


hamartia

by vinnie2757



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII (Video Game 1997)
Genre: Angst, Aphasia, Blood, Blood and Injury, Brain Damage, Emotional Hurt, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Explicit Language, F/M, Human Experimentation, Injury Recovery, Manipulative Relationship, Medical Trauma, Memory Loss, Minor Character Death, Non-Explicit Sex, Paternity Doubts, Pregnancy Scares, Pregnancy complications, Psychological Trauma, Suicidal Thoughts, Survivor Guilt, There is no happy ending to this story, Unrequited Love, behaviour changes associated with brain injury, content warnings, difficult birth, explicit injury, graphic depictions of injury, is sephiroth vincent's? we'll never know, lucrecia is OG design not DoC, there are so many things unfinished, there is no neat bow, theres a lot of vomit, very segmented story telling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-05
Updated: 2021-02-05
Packaged: 2021-03-17 14:21:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 32,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29226903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vinnie2757/pseuds/vinnie2757
Summary: It began with a pristine letter of recommendation but it didn't end with a document box, dusty, battered, and damp.[from when Lucrecia first joined Shinra's Science Department to when she left, and the story that didn't end.]
Relationships: Lucrecia Crescent/Vincent Valentine, exactly 2 mentions of future cid/shera
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	hamartia

**Author's Note:**

> A lot of work went into this, but please look at the additional tags for content warnings. This isn't a story that ends tied up in a bow, and it isn't a story that's kind. You are under no obligation to read this, and I would hate for you to feel like you should.
> 
> The older I get the angrier I've gotten over Lucrecia's characterisation, and with scarfloor's endless support, I have set out to do her justice.
> 
> I hope I've achieved that.
> 
> Contains the headcanons that Lucrecia is Shera's older sister, that Lucrecia is a lot younger than you'd think, and that Vincent isn't a wet blanket. This means it ties, in part, into the wider canon-verse I've established in Fly Me.
> 
> Title from the Greek term meaning "to miss the mark", most commonly associated with being the fatal flaw of a heroine in a tragedy, leading to her downfall.
> 
> I would ask you to enjoy, but it feels wrong to do so. If you feel I've missed any warnings, please let me know, and I will add them.
> 
> Take care of yourselves, lovelies.

Lucrecia is fifteen, and like her sister will in another couple decades, she’s outgrown Mideel. Well, no. This isn’t strictly true. She’s outgrown the boys in Mideel, and she’s outgrown the teachers, and she’s outgrown the few things she’s able to sink her teeth into in her father’s library and in the clinic. It’s a terrible thing for her to feel, but she feels – constrained, almost. Tied. She’s reverse-engineered most of the products in the apothecary, and she’s bored her mother senseless talking biochemistry with her father, who, despite being one of – no, _the_ – best doctor on the planet, has a very limited understanding of the depths of chemicals and all the tiny, impossible things that make up people and animals and plants and the very world they live on.

There’s little left for her in Mideel, and her father knows this, so Lucrecia wakes one morning with an envelope on her desk, the familiar stamp of ShinRa in the corner. Her name is on the front, in a neat, clipped hand, and the stamp declares it from the desk of Dr Grimoire Valentine.

She doesn’t hesitate once she sees it, knows it for what it is, and snatches it up, races out of her bedroom and down the stairs, nearly falls in her haste.

‘When did this arrive?’ she asks, swinging into the kitchen, where her mother is at the counter, kneading dried fruit into bread dough, and her father sits at the table, reading the paper.

He peers over it, eyebrow raised behind his glasses, and hums.

‘Early this morning,’ he says, ‘special messenger.’

Lucrecia opens her mouth, but only a breath manages to escape her. She throws herself into a chair, tears the seal and nearly tears the envelope. The letter is written in the same hand, and she scans it, fingers shaking and eyes widening with every line. Practically buzzing, she barks out a laugh and waves it at her father.

‘You did it!’ she cries and throws herself across the table to hug him.

He doesn’t quite laugh back, but he does hug her, arms so familiar and safe and warm. She’ll miss them, but he’s done the kindest thing she thinks he could ever possibly do for her, and he _did it_!

‘I did it,’ he agrees, ‘though Grim wasn’t looking to take on any students.’

‘He says intern here, with a view of putting me through, if he thinks I’m good enough. He wants me to sit the entrance exam before he agrees.’

‘Well,’ Hersilia says, and though it’s tinged with sadness, Lucrecia is too busy re-reading the letter to pay it any mind, ‘I doubt you’ll have any problems with that.’

Picking at her nails, a laugh bubbles out of her, and Lucrecia chews her lip. ‘Thank you,’ she says, intense, and looks at her father. ‘I – when’s the next exam?’

‘In a week or so,’ Daniel replies, and he’s just as subdued.

Later, Lucrecia will not be able to blame them, because who’d want their only daughter to disappear off to the other side of the world and into the care of a man she’s never met?

Not that she’d be in his care, she’s practically an adult now, and ShinRa’s science department has taken on younger interns than her. Fifteen’s practically ancient, but then, she didn’t go through the academy, so what does she know?

For now, giddy with excitement, she tears off back to her bedroom to read the letter again and again and again.

* * *

Dr Valentine meets her off the coach, and for a moment, she feels a lot shorter than she is. This isn’t to say she’s particularly tall, but Dr Valentine dwarfs her the moment she touches the ground level from the steps off the coach. Barely at his shoulder, he takes her bags without asking, and asks how the journey was.

‘It’s my first time out of Mideel,’ she says, trotting along to keep up with him. ‘I’m very excited to see what the world’s really like!’

He huffs out a laugh and leads her up a flight of stairs towards a towering building.

‘This is just for the time being,’ he tells her, ‘while you do the exam, and we get all the paperwork sorted. Your father speaks very highly of you.’

She tightens her ponytail and looks up at him. ‘Do you know him well?’

‘We’re acquainted,’ Dr Valentine replies, reaching into his coat for a lanyard she’ll soon learn he doesn’t wear and will often forget. ‘He’s a very talented man. Possibly the best doctor of medicine I’ve ever encountered.’

‘I know he’s the best,’ she says, resolute, and he laughs.

‘I’m sure you’ll compare,’ he says. ‘The things your father says you’ve done could put you up there with the greats soon enough.’

She flushes and takes the compliment with gratitude.

* * *

She’s just turned eighteen and she feels like she’s at the top of her game. Some of the academy students have started asking her for help, and now that she’s in Midgar, she feels much more grown up, much more – herself. She’s not got much of a paycheque, because she’s still an intern, technically, even though Dr Valentine thinks she’s absolutely worth every gil he’s demanding from the department budget to put her through her doctorate, and she’s on track to become a Class A Biotechnician before she’s 20. Which would be a feat worth writing home about. She hasn’t been home outside of the Eventide season, when Dr Valentine sends her home with perishables for her mother, because he knows if he didn’t, she’d only stay and try to work.

‘But, Doctor,’ she’ll try to protest, and he’ll politely put his hand two inches from the end of her nose and tell her to, as politely as possible, can it.

‘No buts, Lucrecia,’ he says, or, when she’s feeling a little lost and unsure of herself, he’ll call her Dr Crescent, even though she’s not.

Not yet anyway. But soon! Soon, she’s on track!

So, she doesn’t really go home, but that’s okay, she finds Midgar an – incredible doesn’t seem the right word. It’s an experience she can’t describe. There’s so much to see and do and every time she has free time that she takes, because she takes at least half a day a week to herself, because that’s what Dr Valentine talks to her about at least once a week. Work-life balance. Don’t get absorbed in your work. Have an identity outside of the lab. That’s fine for him to say, she thinks, swatching lipstick on her hand as a primped and preened salesgirl babbles about the latest line of products in her not-listening ear, he doesn’t seem to have a life. He’s there when she gets in in the morning, he’s there when she leaves, and she doesn’t know a single thing about him, except that he jokes about being married to his work. He has an odd sense of calm about him, so she wonders if he practices some mindfulness technique or another. She wouldn’t know calm if she stood in Kalm’s town square.

Ha, get it?

She takes his advice, though, tries to carve out an identity for herself outside of the lab coat and the lanyard with a not-great photo of her on it, and her name’s spelled wrong, but that’s okay, she’ll be issued a new one when she graduates, and she’s grown a lot now from when she first arrived. She has impeccable hair and makeup, and she saved to buy some very nice shoes, smart ones for in the lab, but they have the most beautiful shade of red on the soles, and the heels on them made Dr Valentine raise his eyebrows when she first wore them, but she likes the height they give her. She’s not short, she’s very average, but she likes it anyway. It puts her over some of the snotty members of Dr Valentine’s team, and that’s fine by her. They don’t know what to do when they have to look up at her to insult her.

Taking her purchases to the till, she counts out the gil she needs and wonders if he’s finished translating that tablet yet. They’d found it some weeks ago, but she’s never had a head for languages, no matter how hard she tried, and she struggles enough to read some of their team’s handwriting, never mind Cetran.

She loves Midgar, sure, but she misses the road. She misses being in the field, getting to see things for herself, instead of through a monitor, or over the PHS.

* * *

She doesn’t know what to do. Something is very, very wrong.

‘Dr Valentine?’ she asks, voice cracking.

Her fingertips are shaking, nails scraping against the tile as she reaches across the space between them. He blinks at her.

‘Doctor,’ she croaks, gets her fingertips into his coat, hooks into it, uses the texture to ground herself enough to get onto her other elbow, onto her knees.

She crawls across the broken glass and through the puddle of dark lifestream, grips his coat tight, tries not to tremble.

‘Doctor,’ he replies, barely at a whisper.

‘No,’ she chokes, because she knows what’s coming. She sees it in the sadness of his eyes. ‘No, no don’t go.’

He grips her wrist, and the links of her bracelet pinch her skin. She’ll never wear it again after today, will toss it into a box of paperwork, all of her research and his notes and their work, taped and sealed and forgotten.

Slowly, he nods. He smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. They look grey, but they’d always been so bright, so vibrant. Red, in the right light.

‘Lucy,’ he breathes, and she licks her lips, her mouth too dry, salty with the tears.

‘Yes?’

‘Tell,’ he starts, and his eyes flutter. He looks sad, for a moment, hurt. ‘Tell my son – tell him that I’m sorry.’

She hadn’t known he had a son; he’d never mentioned it. She’d talked his ear off about her family, about her parents and the people she grew up around, so close they might as well have been blood. But he hadn’t mentioned even once that he’d had a son. Was he married? She’d never known.

‘Your son?’ she whispers, but he doesn’t reply.

His eyes stare blankly at her, half-open.

Her lip wobbles, and she bites it hard enough to draw blood.

‘Doctor?’ she asks, shakes the handfuls of coat she’s clutching.

Nothing.

‘Doctor Valentine?’ It’s a squeak of a word, barely coming out of the clog in her throat. ‘No, no, no. Please, please.’

She pats his chest, but he doesn’t do anything.

She scrapes her hands over her face, smears mascara and lipstick and tears, and she chokes on the salt in her throat. Her heart is pounding in her chest, her breaths not coming deep enough, shallow and empty. A moment passes where she sits and stares at the wall, because she’s nineteen, and she doesn’t know what to do. Then she remembers the speaker, the comms with other departments. She’s vaguely aware of the dull whine of the alarm; someone should be coming. Nobody has come. How long has she been sat there?

Scrambling to her feet, she trips over her heel and her ankle bursts into a shooting pain, but she bites back the taste of blood and staggers to the wall, to the speaker, slams the button.

‘Please help,’ she begs into the microphone. ‘Help me, please, I need help, I need – help me, please.’

A crackle, a connection.

‘Dr Crescent?’

‘Professor Hojo!’ It bursts out of her with far more enthusiasm than it should have, but she’s panicking, and there’s a dead body behind her and she’s never been so grateful to hear another voice. ‘It’s – it’s Dr Valentine, he’s – he’s – please help me.’

‘What happened?’

She looks back at where the scientist lies and chokes out a sob.

‘He’s dead,’ she sobs, ‘he’s dead and it’s my fault. He’s dead because of me.’

‘Now, now, girl,’ Hojo says, and later, years and years later, when she has nothing to do but sleep and dream of it, she’ll think that he’s a condescending bastard. Now, she thinks he’s gentle and kind. ‘Calm yourself down. I’ll come and have a look, and we’ll go from there.’

‘Thank you,’ she says, lets the speaker go, slides down the wall and stays in a huddle there until the alarm finally stops blaring and the door slides open to let Hojo in.

* * *

After the funeral, though there was no body to bury, given that he’d returned to the Lifestream barely minutes after Hojo had entered the room, the team refuses to talk to her again. Half of the Science Department refuses to talk to her, and they all look at her with scorn when she enters a room, or they pass her in the corridor. She picks her nails so badly that they wear down to stubs, and so she starts applying false nails over them, disguises the tattered edges with reds and blacks and golds. She wears higher heels, blacker trousers in sharper cuts, bolder reds on her lipsticks. Her ponytail hangs straight down her back, her fringe a perfect line across her brow, her lanyard perfectly square around her neck.

Dr Valentine’s research is abandoned, her thesis laughed out of the lecture hall. By the end of the day, he is discredited as a lunatic, and she’s branded worse alongside him.

She’s not supposed to be able to buy it, given her age, but she gets her hands on a bottle of wine, and she goes to the lab, pours herself a glass and sits there to look over the research, dumping it into a box as she goes.

It’s late when the door shushes open, and Professor Faremis comes in. He doesn’t potter, the way she’d expect him to, considering his nature as a scientist, but he walks tall, shoulders back, and his moustache is very impressive. He reminds her, horribly, in a way that burns in her heart, of her father. She puts it down to the wine and downs the glass.

‘Lucrecia,’ Professor Faremis says, and she juts her chin, feels her lip wobble.

‘Professor Faremis,’ she replies, aims for hard and misses by a solid mile.

He hums, rounds the counter to come and look at the desk, the papers she’s shoving haphazard into a box, plain and boring and cardboard.

‘Gast, please,’ he says, ‘I always hated the formality.’

‘Professor Gast, then,’ she compromises, feels the tightness in her throat. She clears it, and looks up at him, feels the headrush of the wine. ‘How can I help you?’

‘I wanted to make sure you were alright,’ he says, leans a hip against the desk, picks up a sheet of paper, and raises his eyebrows when she snatches it from his hands, gives it a cursory glance, and shoves it in the box with the others, creasing several beneath it.

‘I’m fine,’ she grits out.

Gast folds his arms, watches her through the thick lenses of his glasses. She breathes, shakily, her lip wobbles, and she sniffles. Her hand shakes as she pours herself another glass of wine. Gently, his hands warm against hers, Gast reaches across the desk and takes the bottle from her, puts it behind him on the counter.

‘Lucrecia,’ he says again, and the sob wrenches itself out of her chest before she can stop it. ‘Oh dear. Come now, you’re alright.’

He pats her back awkwardly, and she buries her face in her hands, sobs until she’s got nothing left but a few hiccups.

‘There you go,’ he says, and his moustache twitches. ‘I think, perhaps – this may not sound – I understand things have been – tough – since Grim passed.’

Lucrecia snorts, swipes under eyes with one fingertip, checks it for mascara. Her fingertips are black, but she doesn’t know what she expected.

‘Tough,’ she echoes. ‘They hate me. And rightfully so. It’s my fault he’s dead.’

Gast shakes his head, pushes upright, and paces a little.

‘You cannot say that,’ he says, ‘the guilt will consume you. But, if you feel it’s – no one would blame you if you walked away.’

She whips around in her chair, feels hair cling to the remnants of her lipstick.

‘Walk away?’ she echoes, and it comes out strangled, too loud. ‘I – I can’t _walk_ away. I am – I am a Class A Biotechnician! I am _the youngest_ Class A! I’d have – I’d have!’ She bangs her palm on the table, and the wine glass, half-full, trembles. ‘I would have passed if Doctor Valentine hadn’t died! I was _so close_ , and I’m not – I’m not going to let them take that from me! I am a good scientist, Professor Gast! I am really, really good! And just because they think – just because I’m – I’m not going to let them tell me otherwise!’

Gast watches her for a moment, his face impassive, and then he breaks with a sigh, looks at his feet. His hands shove deep into his pockets, and he looks small. If she stood up, she thinks she’d be taller than him in the heels she’d worn, but she took them off when she sat down. Her feet hurt. Her ankles. The one she sprained hasn’t stopped aching since she did it, and she refuses to wear flat shoes. It would be weakness now.

When he looks up, he looks tired.

‘Go to your dorm, Lucy,’ he says, and her lip wobbles again, but she bites it. Hard.

Dr Valentine had called her Lucy, for the first and last time, just before he died. The name feels dirty, somehow. Aching with a weight it can’t hold.

Because she is young, and probably certifiably stupid, and he looks so much like her father, she snorts, shoves away from her chair and staggers, thinks she’s in her shoes when she’s not.

‘What?’ she scoffs, grabs the chair to brace herself. ‘Am I grounded?’

‘No,’ he smiles, gentle, gentle. ‘No, you’re very drunk off a very strong bottle of wine that I am surprised you got hold of, and you need to sleep. But you can’t sleep here.’

Lucrecia swallows thickly, and hiccups when it goes sideways in her throat. She screws her eyes shut. Nods.

‘I think you’re right.’

‘Come on,’ Gast says, ‘get your shoes, and I’ll walk you part of the way.’

She uses the wall to steady herself as they make their way down the corridors, and she stops to throw up in one of the bins. He doesn’t laugh at her, which is nice of him, and he makes them divert to the canteen, where he buys her apple juice and pancakes and waits her out as she picks her way through it.

It takes her a few goes to beep her lanyard to get her through the door onto the dorm floor, and he waits at the end of the corridor for her to fall through the door. She’ll feel rotten in the morning, but at least she’s in her room.

* * *

A few days pass, and Lucrecia barely leaves her room. She thinks about what Gast had said and wonders if she should walk away. After lying in her bed for almost an entire day, she calls her father, and tells him about it.

‘I don’t blame him,’ Daniel says with a sigh, ‘it was a shock, hearing that Grim had died. But you are an adult now, darling, you can make your own choices.’

‘What would you do?’ she asks, quietly, into the edge of her pillow.

‘I’d stay,’ he says, ‘because I wouldn’t want to give up when I’m so close to passing.’

She nods, doesn’t say anything.

‘But don’t stay because you think it’s what I want you to do. And don’t come home because you think that’s what I want. Do what you think is right. We both love you very, very much, and we’ll be proud of you no matter what.’

She sobs into her pillow some more, and then gets up to put her makeup on and get back to work.

* * *

Professor Gast calls a meeting late in the evening about a week after Lucrecia’s hangover has worn off. She’s been in the lab all day, trying to make some sense of what she had left to work with, but hadn’t gotten very far. She’s grateful for the distraction, and heads to his office, where she click-clacks into stride next to Professor Hojo.

‘You stayed?’ Hojo says, and she tries not to wrinkle her nose.

‘I did. I have work to do.’

He hums, says nothing, and doesn’t hold the door for her when he walks into Gast’s office.

‘It has felt – very disjointed,’ Gast says, when they’re all crammed in there amidst the books and papers and overstuffed chairs of his office.

That’s one way of putting it. Lucrecia is seeing men she’s never seen before. She’s also seeing that there aren’t any other women in here.

‘Why are we here, Gast? We’ve all got work to do,’ says one of the scientists, and then he glances at Lucrecia. ‘Well, most of us.’

She opens her mouth, but Hojo waves him down.

‘Shut up, Hollander.’

She shoots him a look of gratitude, but he doesn’t even acknowledge her.

‘As I was saying, it has felt very disjointed here,’ Gast repeats, ‘since Grim’s passing. We were never very.’ He pauses, searches for the word, makes a vague sphere with his hands, like he’s patting the air into shape. ‘Together. As a team. Considering that for the most part, we’ve been working on the same new projects, it makes sense that we restructure, so that we can get the most out of our staff. Wouldn’t you agree?’

Lucrecia casts her eyes across the room at the other scientists. Hojo looks unmoved, Hollander looks disgruntled, the other’s varying shades of in-between. She hadn’t known there’d been a new project, but nobody else seems surprised; how much had she missed, working with Dr Valentine?

‘Hojo,’ Gast is saying when she starts listening again. ‘As our Miss Crescent here is so close to graduating, I thought you would be best to take over her mentorship. You’re our most senior biotechnician, after all.’

‘After you,’ Hojo snorts, and shoves his glasses up his nose. He glances at Lucrecia, looks her up and down. Mostly up, because her shoes make her taller than him by a good six inches, though with his hunch it’s more like twelve. ‘How long did the old boy think you have?’

‘I just had to submit my thesis,’ she replies, and Hojo snorts.

‘No,’ he says. ‘You’ll start afresh, be in my office at six tomorrow.’

‘Six?’ she asks, can feel the height of her eyebrows.

‘I was under the impression that you cared about your career, girl,’ he says, and she puts her shoulders back, no matter how much they wanted to roll in.

‘Yes, sir,’ she replies, squares her jaw as best she can.

‘Then you’ll be in my office at six.’

She nods, and Gast moves onto other things. She glances at Hojo, but he’s not looking at her. There’s something about the set of his jaw, though, and she’s not sure of it.

* * *

The new project is fascinating, and she absorbs all the information that she can as quickly as she can. What she’d worked on with Dr Valentine had been – had been – it had been incredible, but this was something else entirely. The things that they’d found already, and the things that they’d be able to find now that they had word of new equipment, new funding. A new location.

‘Nibelheim?’ she asks, as she scans the last of the new documents. It had taken her a week of hard slog to fish through all of Hojo’s work, because it was disjointed and poorly organised and his handwriting was atrocious.

She thinks that when she can’t sleep, she’ll write it all up neatly, and put it into order. It’ll help with her thesis, anyway, she thinks. Though – she’s not sure what she’ll write it on yet. He hadn’t given her much in the way of advice, and he’d given her even less in the way of guidance. Just shoved his pile of scrappy, battered manilla folders at her and told her to use her brain for something other than – he’d stopped himself, but she knew he wanted to imply she was something she was not. A whore, maybe, by the red of her mouth – _Bad Reputation_ , which she’d thought was funny, and a little bit ironic, but she hadn’t had anyone to share the joke with – or maybe he considered her a bad scientist.

A murderer.

She swallows thickly.

It had been an accident. An _accident_. One she caused, one that killed a man she’d admired and adored and had wanted to spend her life learning from. She’d caused it, and she hadn’t done it on purpose.

But hadn’t he always told her not to rush into things? To wait, to be patient?

She shouldn’t have pressed the button, and she shouldn’t have let him shove her out of the way.

‘Yes, we have a property there that we have available for our use.’

‘But why not stay here in Midgar?’ she asks, and Hojo shoots her a look across the table.

She looks back at the documents and doesn’t ask again.

* * *

She’s been to Nibelheim before, once or twice, with Dr Valentine, when they were hunting out information, and it’s as pretty now as it was then. She aches with sadness for a moment or two, because she’ll never be with him again, and then she straightens her shoulders and turns back towards the Manor, dragging her case inside. There are bedrooms enough for the three of them and whatever staff needs to come and go, but for the most part, they have freedom over the building.

Ha, freedom. Hojo is a much more demanding mentor than Dr Valentine had ever been, and he’s not nearly as full of enjoyment of life. Much more the opposite, she’s found. He’s more interested in the results than the process, which leads to some fascinating and amazing developments, certainly, but she finds herself waking up tired.

She puts her bags down on the bed of the room with her name – spelled wrong, they always spell it with a T – on a piece of paper pinned to the door, and goes to the window, looks out over the town. It’s a lovely view, she thinks, rubs her neck with both hands. She feels exhausted, but somehow it doesn’t feel like there’s any time to rest.

A rap at the door, and she screws her face up, but tries to keep her shoulders level.

‘Yes?’ she asks, turning.

She expects it to be Hojo, or Planet forbid, Hollander, but it’s neither.

‘Oh!’ she says, blinks, feels very stupid, and very small. ‘Hello?’

‘Vincent Valentine, ma’am,’ and okay, that voice is a lot deeper than she expected it to be, though she has to ask herself what she expected it to sound like. ‘I’ve been assigned as your security detail for the duration of your stay in Nibelheim.’

She stares at him, and she’d heard the phrase “a long drink of water” before, but she’s never once thought to give the opposite sex much consideration. Much the same as her sister will be in another few decades, she’s blindsided by the man opposite her. Tall and well-shaped, slender without looking gangly for the length of his arms and legs. Broad shoulders. His suit impeccably cut, his hair tousled in a way that it looks like hands have been in it – later, she will learn that it’s just like that, because Vincent has few instances of luck in his life, but his hair has been one – and the most startlingly familiar eyes.

‘Why would,’ she starts, and then licks her lips, feels her heart constrict, ache.

Why would they send his son? Do they know? Is this the Planet’s punishment? Has the Planet itself decided she needs more punishment? Is she to be haunted by this for the rest of her life?

‘Why would?’ Vincent echoes, and his eyebrows crease, mouth twitching. He looks very serious.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says, and offers him a smile she knows doesn’t quite reach her eyes. ‘It wasn’t – I didn’t expect to have a Turk in my doorway, is all. I didn’t think – it surprises me that they think we need protection.’

Vincent puts his hands in his pockets, and it shifts his jacket enough that she can see the shape of the chest holster beneath it. He shrugs a little, gives a cursory scan around the room. It’s very bland, but she supposes it’s supposed to be. It’s barely more than a hotel.

‘They did not share with me what you are researching, Dr Crescent,’ he says, and she feels a flush in her neck, because she _isn’t_ a doctor, not yet. ‘Merely that they believed there would be some opposed to it.’

She looks out of the window, and then turns back to him. ‘Do you think they would? Try to hurt us, I mean.’

‘I would not be here if they believed otherwise.’

Which is not the comfort he must think it is. She tries for a laugh, almost sticks it, and turns to her cases.

‘Well, then, Mr Valentine,’ she says, and nearly chokes on it. Clearing her throat, she adds, ‘I’d best unpack.’

He hovers for a moment, and she turns her gaze to him. He’s staring at her, and she can’t say she’s overly surprised. Men have started to stare at her lately. Eating properly in the canteen has done wonders for her figure, and it’s made her feel very grown up. She’d been a little rake of nothingness when she arrived under Dr Valentine, but nobody can accuse her of not being a woman now.

Well. She supposes. It’s not like.

Well!

She focuses her gaze again, and there’s something curious in his expression. He licks his lips. She swallows.

He clacks his heels, offers her a sharp nod, and turns to leave. She can hear him clatter down the stairs, and then a door slams.

Men.

* * *

Days later, she wakes late to a rap at the door.

‘Lucrecia?’

Vincent.

She hauls herself out of the bed and across the floor to open the door enough to peer through it.

‘I brought you tea,’ he says, holds up a paper cup with a plastic lid, ‘from the café across the way. You said you liked it last week.’

She takes it, yawns so loudly she cracks her jaw, and thanks him. Their fingers brush, and she jerks her gaze to his hand. His nails are remarkably clean, and there are a few grazes on his knuckles, the faintest, oldest little pockmarks of fading red scabs.

‘You’re alright?’ he asks, furrowed brows low over his eyes, blazing crimson in the light filtering through the curtains behind her.

‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I was up late working on my thesis. Did I miss breakfast?’

He holds up a paper bag.

‘Croissant,’ he says, ‘with a jar of the forest fruit conserve.’

She feels a smile on her mouth and switches the tea to her other hand so she can take it.

‘Thank you,’ she says, meets his gaze, and her mouth dries at the heat she finds there.

‘You’re welcome,’ he replies, and it hangs in the air between them for a moment.

A noise outside, a car backfiring or a monster. She startles, he whirls to look, and she slams the door on him.

* * *

'He’s a pain,’ Hojo grumbles as Vincent excuses himself to do a patrol of the grounds.

Lucrecia looks up from her papers, crumpled in her hand as she tries to shovel scrambled eggs into her mouth on her fork. Hojo wrinkles his nose at her. She ignores it.

‘Vincent?’ she asks, giving up on the last of her eggs. She turns back to her papers. ‘I don’t see why.’

Hojo snorts and gets to his feet. He’s hunched so much over the years that she doesn’t think he could stand straight if he tried.

‘You wouldn’t,’ he says, and she squints at him as he retreats.

* * *

It’s been a long week, a long month, a long fucking year. Jenova is fascinating, but the pressure of trying to write her thesis with Hojo breathing down her neck about everything she’s doing wrong, and trying to not let Hollander’s attitude bother her, and just – just –

She draws a bath and considers drowning herself in it, just to get away from them for five minutes.

She misses Dr Valentine. She misses him a lot. His son bears enough of a resemblance that it’s almost painful, but they’re so different, and the more she gets to know Vincent, because she can’t not get to know him when he’s there morning, noon, and night, the more she can’t see that resemblance.

He doesn’t know. She’s sure of that. He has no idea that his father is dead because of her. He knows he’s dead, of course, she’s sure he would have attended the funeral if he could have, but he was in training at the time, and couldn’t get the time off. Or so his letter had said. But he must know that she used to work for him. It was widely documented and freely jeered at, but perhaps her reputation hasn’t preceded her that much. Or maybe he doesn’t – didn’t – talk to his father much.

She’s not about to bring it up.

The bubbles are starting to fizzle out when there’s a knock at the door.

‘Yes?’ she calls, because she’s not getting out of the bath for anything less than a fire.

‘It’s Vincent, ma’am,’ comes the reply, and she groans to herself.

‘It’s open!’ she calls after a minute’s consideration, and then, after the door clicks open, ‘I’m in the bath, stay in the room!’

The door clicks shut, and she’s suddenly very aware that she’s – she’s – she’s never been alone with a man before. Not when she’s been naked, anyway. The doctors that had done her physicals had always been women, small and old and angry. No man’s ever seen her naked, except maybe her father when she was a child.

‘Is everything alright?’ she asks, just to distract herself.

‘I thought,’ Vincent starts, and then he hesitates.

She’d been about to scrub herself down, because it feels very strange and uncomfortable to be in the bath when he’s stood the other side of a partition wall, but his hesitation makes her hesitate.

‘You thought?’ she asks and reaches for the soap. ‘Dangerous, in your position, don’t you think?’

He snorts.

‘I understand that I am not paid to think,’ he assures her, dry. ‘But I couldn’t help but notice that you are – tired. I thought perhaps you might like to take a walk.’

She feels her lips twist. It’s not quite a smile, but it’s not disgust either.

‘If I am, as you say, tired,’ she hums, finishes her legs and twists to get her back. ‘How will a walk help me any?’

She can hear him scuff his feet. He’s got proportionally sized feet, for his height; elevens, maybe. But she wonders if the whole shoe size thing is accurate.

‘I found a plateau, partway up the mountain,’ Vincent says, quietly enough. ‘It makes for a good viewing platform, if you like to look at the sky and the landscape. I thought, perhaps. You might like to take some time to look at something not research notes.’

She pauses, water dribbling down her neck. She finds that she would like that.

‘Yes,’ she says, with a nod that he can’t see. ‘I would like that. Let me finish up and I’ll be with you in a minute.’

‘You’ll need sensible shoes,’ he tells her, ‘the paths aren’t made for high heels.’

She rolls her eyes. ‘I have walking boots.’

* * *

The vista is wonderful, but more wonderful is the way he kisses her, cupping her jaw in one hand and struggling with the clasp of her trousers with the other. She reaches down to help him, and he bites at her tongue, her lips, making her laugh.

‘Okay,’ she gasps, as he finally gets her trousers open and gets his hand between her legs. ‘Point made.’

It’s not, he promises her later, face buried in her neck and elbow holding her knee back in a way that makes her back bow, her fingers clutch at the warm expanse of his back, nails digging in, it’s not what he brought her up here for.

‘Not complaining,’ she promises in return, drags her hands down the muscles of his lats, the dimples at the base of his spine, feels the flex of his hips.

Later still, after she’s pieced herself back together, got her trousers done back up and her blouse straightened, her ponytail scraped back into place, she looks across at him, standing with his hands in his pockets and staring out across the landscape, the sea wine-red in the setting sun. He looks unaffected, looks – looks –

He glances back at her, and there’s lipstick smeared across his mouth.

 _Bad Reputation_ , indeed.

* * *

She wonders if she should tell him. He must know, because there must have been some kind of record, some report somewhere, telling him about the people he was assigned to protect.

It feels like she’s living a lie, and she’s drowning in it.

* * *

He doesn’t eat with them for a week or so after that. If any of the others notice, they don’t say anything. If she’s not in the lab with Hojo, she’s in her room writing her thesis. She gets through three highlighters and four ballpoint pens writing and rewriting whole sections, and she breaks three nails picking at them. They’re acrylic, they aren’t meant to break, so she writes a letter of complaint to the salon in Midgar.

She’s been running experiments, petri dishes filled with petrify and sleep and so many other poisons, seeing how human cells respond, how Jenova’s cells respond, if there’s something there for medical purposes. She’d think her father would like to know if there was something – anything – that could make his job easier. There’s so much they don’t know about the Cetra, so much about their physiology, and if this Cetra, if this ancient being they’ve somehow been – been – lucky enough – to get hold of! If that can give them some answers, she thinks Dad might like to know.

Hojo has strictly forbidden her from contacting him about it, and so she chews on her knuckles as she watches the cells eat each other for as long as she can bear before she turns and leaves the lab, climbs the rickety stairs on her toes so that her heels don’t get caught in the cracks of the floorboards again. The air in the Manor is stale, but fresher than the dampness of the lab. She takes deep, gulping breaths of it in, doesn’t know why her heart pounds against her ribs as hard as it does.

Maybe she’s just unfit. She spends a lot of her time sat in a chair staring at petri dishes and poorly-written reports. She needs to get out more.

Outside, because she supposes now is as good a time as any to go for lunch, to stare at the people living their lives without the constant bubbling of discovery just beneath their skin, she finds Vincent. He’s sat on the wall, which is a few feet above her head, and his feet dangle at about shoulder height.

‘I’m going to get something to eat,’ she says, and his foot twitches with his flinch.

His eyes shine crimson in the sunlight as he peers down at her, and then he pushes himself off the wall, landing silently next to her. He’s close, too close, but her blood thrums. Not close enough.

‘I’ll come with you,’ he says, calm as he likes.

‘I,’ she starts, and then stops. There’s heat in his expression, and she feels it in her ears. ‘Thank you.’

He sits opposite her in the café, black coffee in front of him, one sugar, stirred exactly eight times counter-clockwise. She orders a pastry and tea and asks if her back’s to the window for a reason.

‘I wanted to look out of it,’ she says.

‘Safer,’ he replies with a shrug. ‘I can see more this way.’

‘But what about what I can see?’ she asks.

He raises an eyebrow and turns his gaze across the street.

She huffs into a mouthful of powdered sugar and puff pastry, and stares at the pictures on the wall.

* * *

Working with Dr Valentine had been freeing, every day a new adventure, and she’d been so eager to get into work. Nibelheim feels claustrophobic. She has to ask Hojo for permission to work in the lab, because he’s in there doing research she’s not privy to, even though the Jenova project is something Professor Gast has put her on! He’s agreed that she’s good enough, and Dr Valentine would have wanted her to do well, to do experience all the things science had to offer! He’d have wanted more from his colleague.

If she wants to go into town, or Planet forbid she wants to go any further afield, she has to ask Vincent’s permission, and he’s eager enough to accompany her places. Sometimes, all she wants to do is go for a walk, just to clear her head of the musty air in the Manor, and see something other than a screen, and he’s happy enough to follow her. Which, sure, whatever, that’s _fine_ , she supposes! He’s there to protect her, and if a wolf or Valron or a _dragon_ decides it wants to try and take a piece out of her, she’s not in any position to fight it off, and that hand-cannon he carries around against his ribs is more than enough for anything around here, but even so!

It makes it very difficult to keep her distance, and she doesn’t _want_ him close. It’s cloying, how close he gets – not that she doesn’t enjoy his company! He makes her laugh, and he’s embarrassingly soft, at moments, stumbling over things he tries to say to impress her, and she likes that he’s just – normal. She can talk to him about normal things, and he cares about her opinion on things, and it’s nice. Having a _conversation_.

But then his fingers curl in her belt loops, and he cups her jaw, and it’s difficult to say no to that, to someone that so obviously wants everything she can offer.

She wants to offer it, but she’s – Dr Valentine hangs over her, sometimes, and she hates that his son makes her forget the weight of what she did.

She should tell him, she thinks, clambering over a rockslide despite his pleas for her to not, because the rocks aren’t stable, and she could fall, and he’d hate to have to tell her parents about it, she should tell him what she did.

Mostly, she just wants to get away.

* * *

Dr Valentine had called her headstrong; his successor calls her an idiot.

‘Need I remind you,’ Hojo spits at her the first time she tries to contradict him, her findings so very different to his, and his ideas _dangerous_ , ‘that I am the only one that knows what truly happened in that lab?’

He’s in her face, holding onto the chair so she can’t get away from him. There’s venom in his eyes, a madness she knows but cannot name.

‘No,’ she replies, every bit as venomous as he is. ‘You don’t.’

Her throat feels tight, like she’d been in the sea and had swallowed lungfuls.

‘Then you will do as I have asked, or I will let Professor Gast know you for what you are.’

‘And what is that?’ she spits, but Hollander comes waltzing in with coffee, and Hojo turns away as though nothing is wrong.

* * *

Vincent knocks on her door a few days later, and when she answers, bedraggled and bleary-eyed, because it’s not even dawn, he thrusts a pair of black and red running shoes at her.

‘Put these on,’ he says.

‘I don’t have a sports bra,’ she replies, and he looks at her with the kind of disgust that tells her that she’s being an idiot and thinking too literally.

‘Lucrecia,’ he says, and she feels heat curl in her belly.

‘Give me five minutes,’ she replies, and snatches the shoes from him before shutting the door.

He takes her up the mountain, higher this time, to another plateau where she can see the sun beginning to crest over the range, and she’s huffing and puffing, bent at the waist.

‘I’m unfit,’ she begs to her toes, and he laughs, hasn’t even broken a sweat.

‘It isn’t your job to be fit,’ he assures her, and pulls her in.

She alternates between watching him watching her and watching the sun rise, shutting her eyes and exposing her throat when he bends her legs back.

She just about gets the shakes in her knees out by the time they get back to the Manor. He looks at her as she enters the house, and she thinks about the petri dishes.

* * *

‘I think it’s high time you met her,’ Hojo says one morning, and Lucrecia looks up from her notes, comparing the differences between the Petrify and the Stop dishes with a frown.

‘Who?’ she asks, as though there is anyone else for her to meet.

‘Jenova.’

Vincent drives them up to the reactor, oddly silent the entire drive. Lucrecia stares out of the window and picks at her nails.

The reactor is hot, stifling, and Hojo leads her through a side door, locked with a key card that he informs her only he and Hollander have access to. Vincent waits outside, and Lucrecia looks back at him from the top of the stairs, suddenly feels adrift. She grips the railing, takes a breath, follows Hojo inside.

There’s a separate chamber, far to the back of the one they enter, and it’s full of containers. Each is easily big enough for a man.

‘What are these for?’ Lucrecia asks, and Hojo hums.

‘We are nearing the point in our research where we will be able to begin to examine the effects upon human cells,’ he says, and she frowns at the back of his head. ‘ShinRa wishes to utilise the power the Ancients held, and to do that we believe we will need an Ancient.’

‘But there are none left,’ she says, and he gives her a scathing look.

‘Idiot girl,’ he snipes, and totters off up the stairs.

She can’t imagine having such slumped shoulders and grips the rail tight enough that her nails ache as she follows him.

Through another door, and she’s face-to-face with the – the –

‘She’s,’ she starts, but there are no words for her.

Beautiful is not the word she’d want, considering the veins and tubes coming out of every part of her, the oversized heart at the bottom of the tank.

‘The tank is for her protection,’ Hojo explains, and she glances at him, looks at his face so lit up and enamoured. ‘The air here is caustic, poisonous. We can filter it, give her all the things she needs. Nutrients and chemicals and anything else she requires.’

Monstruous, maybe. The face it wears is worthy of adoration, perfect cheekbones and the jaw of a model, something severe about the downturn of the lips. But ethereal, something she can’t take her eyes away from. Slowly, carefully, she climbs the last of the stairs and comes close enough to the tank that her breath fogs it.

‘She’s beautiful, is she not?’ Hojo asks.

Lucrecia wipes her breath from the glass and feels seen.

‘Yes,’ she replies, but the pounding of her heart is not kind.

* * *

Her hands shake the entire drive back to the Manor. Vincent looks at her in the rear-view, his eyebrows knotted. She swallows, stares out of the window, digs her nails into her palms until they bite.

* * *

It’s quick, and it’s dirty, and he doesn’t ask questions when she grabs his arm and drags him aside late in the evening. It’s dangerously close to people, to the Manor. They could be seen. She doesn’t care, her heart still pounding and her head aching with the weight of a heartbeat not her own. His fingers dig into her hips, breath hot against the back of her neck, and she breaks a nail clutching at the wall.

‘Are you alright?’ he asks, as he helps her hike her trousers back over her hips.

She swallows. Her eyes are buzzing.

‘Yes,’ she lies.

* * *

She asks Hojo for permission to go home, just for a weekend. It’s been over a year since she last went, and she’s tired. She misses her father, her mother, the kids that played in the square. She misses so many things. The Manor is not her home, and she can’t help but feel that Dr Valentine would have helped find a way for her to make it a home. Having his son stalk about the place looking both confused and serious, the opposite of the calm collection that had always been on Dr Valentine’s face, even until the end, it doesn’t help. Makes it worse, even.

Hojo calls Gast, who has another member of Administrative Research sent down to cover while Vincent takes her home.

She packs a bag, meets him out front the morning of the drive, which will take a day in itself, and he looks – casual. He’s still in his suit, because he’s still on duty, but his top button’s undone beneath his tie, and his hair’s tousled more than normal, like he hasn’t bothered to try and tame it. He’s chatting, pleasantly, to the other suit, another youngish sort of man, tall and broad with dark hair and unshaven jaw. He looks even more serious than Vincent does, which says something.

As he puts her bag into the boot, Vincent gives her a look of concern, and she shakes her head, gets into the passenger seat for the first time.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’ he asks, gentle enough, looks at her as they wind down a dirt track. ‘What you saw in there? You’ve been, not yourself, since you came back.’

‘Because you’d know what I am,’ she replies, a little harder than she needed to, and she apologises.

Vincent takes it with a shrug, turns his attention back to the road. They drive in silence for another few minutes, and then she heaves a sigh that aches in her ribs.

‘Lucrecia,’ Vincent says, and checks the mirrors before pulling off onto a side road, a less defined dirt track than the one they’d been on, pulling the car to a stop some ways down it. There’s not even the whisper of the wind here, just the weight of his breath, the exhaustion in her chest.

‘Vincent,’ she replies, looks across at him.

He reaches across the space between them, takes her hand for a moment, then he changes his mind, cups her jaw, fingertips callused and so, _so_ gentle.

‘You are brilliant,’ he tells her, and she chokes. ‘You are smart, and you are funny, and you – you deserve so much more than you have.’

A sob leaps from her throat, but she bites the rest down, swallows them thickly like bad medicine. In the shadow of the car, his eyes are wine, and the intensity that he watches her with, it makes her blood boil. She wants to be sick.

Instead, she grabs the front of his jacket and drags him in.

* * *

Mideel feels very small now, compared to the expanse of Midgar and the lull of Nibelheim. It’s late, because they’d taken a detour, and he’d taken her to pieces before reassembling her, the sureness of his hands familiar to her already. Cool, confident, betrayed only by the shake of his fingertips as he breathed hard into her neck, the bite of his nails as they curled into the curve of her arse, holding her as close as he could get her in the confines of the backseat. A shudder runs down her spine at the thought.

But late or not, there’s still a low-hanging sun to light their way, and she leads him up the path to the clinic, because her father will still be there, even if she’s sure her mother will have returned home.

He’s with an old lady, checking mobility in her fingers when Lucrecia enters.

‘Ah,’ he says with a bright smile, ‘there you are. We were beginning to wonder. Your mother’s gone to put dinner on – who’s this?’

Lucrecia turns back to Vincent. His tie’s on backwards. She clears her throat. He looks too big in the doorway, too tall and gangly, and with the sun behind him, he could have been his father, an imposing silhouette hiding the softness of his soul.

‘This is Vincent. He’s from the Department of the Administrative Research, sent to keep me safe. Vincent, this is my father, Daniel Crescent.’

Vincent nods, and makes a vague gesture with his hand, as if extending it to shake, but there’s too much space between them, and Daniel’s hands are occupied.

‘A pleasure, Doctor,’ Vincent says.

‘You’re treating my daughter well?’ Daniel asks, and Lucrecia frowns at him.

‘I am keeping her safe, sir,’ Vincent replies, because he is not an idiot, and he has manners.

Daniel nods. ‘I’ve got another couple of patients, and then I’ll be back. Say hello to your mother and take him round the block.’

Lucrecia nods, and ushers Vincent out.

‘He is well-respected within the scientific community,’ Vincent offers, and Lucrecia snorts.

‘He’s the only one that knows how to properly apply a plaster,’ she replies, and almost takes his hand.

Their fingers brush, and they both recoil.

Neither of them mentions it.

* * *

After dinner, a simple affair that she’s missed like breathing, Lucrecia sits and rubs at her neck with both hands.

‘It’s those shoes of yours,’ her mother says, as she collects the plates and waves Vincent down as he gets to his feet to help. ‘No, no, you’re a guest, sit down. You should go out to the springs.’

This to her daughter, who peers up through her fringe. Vincent looks along the table at her.

‘Springs?’ he asks.

‘Hot springs,’ Hersilia says helpfully. ‘Mideel is lucky enough to have several.’

Lucrecia closes her eyes for a moment, rests her soul in the weight of her palms pressed to her nape. She opens them, stares at the ceiling.

‘Sure,’ she says, nods. ‘Sure. But it’s not the shoes.’

‘It’s hunching over the computer,’ Vincent adds, because Vincent is a traitor.

Daniel tuts. ‘What have I told you about your posture at the computer?’

She glares at Vincent, but it’s playful enough, a twitch of a smile around her mouth. He smiles back at her, and she huffs out a breath.

‘To always sit with my back straight and to get up every half an hour, even if just for a minute. I’m fine, Dad, honestly.’

‘You’re twenty,’ he corrects, and Vincent’s eyes twitch, widening for half a second before settling back into neutrality. Had he not known? Lucrecia is so thrown by it that she misses her father’s spiel about bad posture ageing her before her time, but she’s so used to his ways that she nods and ‘uh-huh’s in the right place.

He hadn’t known she was twenty? How old did he think she was?

For that matter.

How old is he?

Not more than twenty-five, surely.

He walks her to the springs, because it’s his job to keep her safe. She suspects more than likely he’s going to confront her about her age.

‘I didn’t realise you were so young,’ he says, and she squints at him, toes off the soft shoes she’d worn down the path to the springs, because she didn’t feel like strapping her heels on, and she didn’t want to wear them with wet feet.

‘I’m not young,’ she replies. ‘Don’t say it like I’m a child.’

His eyebrows climb, and he looks her up and down.

‘No one would mistake you for a child, Lucrecia,’ he assures her, dry. ‘I simply mean. You must have been very young when you started your career.’

She watches his eyes, rubies in the low light of the lanterns, but there’s no hint of anything in them. No sign that he knows she interned for his father, no inclination to suspect she’s keeping something from him. She frowns at him, and he cocks his head.

‘Fifteen,’ she says, and pulls her sweater over her head.

He considers this as she finishes undressing, and she’s missed the heat of the springs, feels it seep into her joints and her veins the very second she sticks her toes in. She sighs, soft, and for a moment, a single moment, she feels free.

‘You’re beautiful,’ Vincent tells her, and she startles, whirls around to look at him.

She’s never been naked in front of him, in all the months he’s been with them, with – with her. Not that they’ve had much occasion to be – well. She’s had more and more work mounting up, new research opportunities and new petri dishes, and test tubes, and Hojo’s taken her to see Jenova several times now, each visit more and more unsettling than the last.

She’s been busy, is all. They haven’t had much time.

She feels the urge to put an arm across her chest, but she swallows, and stands there, bold as brass. He looks her up and down, and she watches his face, watches the hunger in his eyes as he shifts forwards to reach for her, draw her in. He kisses her so gently, his fingertips barely touching her skin, feeling like the first snowflakes, and she shudders.

‘Vincent,’ she whispers, and he nods, nose brushing hers.

‘I know,’ he whispers back, but she doesn’t think he does.

He kisses her for a very, very long time, until her knees begin to buckle, and then he pulls away. She almost misses him, but he’s yanking at his suit, and when he’s naked too, he’s slipping into the water alongside her.

Part of her wonders, desperately, clawing at his back and biting into the hand he’s got pressed to her mouth, whether they’ll ever find themselves in a bed. Part of her wonders if she’d want to.

He pants her name into her ear, turns her head to kiss her, and she doesn’t wonder much of anything.

* * *

She washes her face in the bathroom when she wakes, and when she straightens, she finds her first grey hair. Wrinkling her nose, she wraps a finger around it and tugs it free. Sat on the edge of the bathtub, she twirls it between her fingers, back and forth, back and forth, watching it catch the light.

She blinks, and it’s brown again, same as the rest of her hair.

* * *

Her mother is obsessed with him, thinks the sun shines out of his arse, and it’s almost enough to make her dry heave into her cereal. Years later, when the pain has eased, and her sister has grown enough to make the same stupid choices, her mother will not be so obsessed with her daughter’s choice of partner. She’ll have learnt her lesson, and it won’t be until her daughter’s name has changed and she comes home with an infant on her hip that she’ll let herself be interested.

But that’s in the future. Now, she wants to know everything she can know about the man that’s caught her daughter’s attention.

‘She’s never really been interested in boys,’ Hersilia says, and Vincent’s ears go a little pink.

He catches Lucrecia’s eye across the table, and Lucrecia raises her eyebrows, sticks her tongue in her cheek with her lips pursed just enough that he chokes on a mouthful of coffee.

‘No?’ he squeaks, because otherwise he’d have to acknowledge that his host’s daughter, his charge, the woman he’s been assigned to protect, well, he’d have to admit that she just proposed sucking his cock at the breakfast table. She’d like to see him try, to be honest. He watches her, and she watches him back, a promise that makes him blush.

‘No,’ Hersilia agrees, totally oblivious. ‘I can’t say I worried too much about it, but it’s nice to see that she’s found a nice young man.’

Lucrecia gags into her cereal, and Hersilia makes a song and dance of chiding her, because she’s her mother, and mothers exist to embarrass their daughters in front of –

He’s not her boyfriend.

He’s not even really her friend.

No, that’s harsh, and she realises with a start that he’s probably her best friend.

She stares into her cereal and says nothing for the rest of breakfast.

* * *

Sometimes he looks at her like he loves her. Sometimes she catches him out of the corner of her eye, looking so soft, so warm, and she can’t bear it. It makes her want to scream, cry, claw his eyes out. She doesn’t deserve him looking at her like that, like she’s beautiful, innocent of all crimes.

Sometimes, she thinks she should tell him, because the guilt weighs on her like a rock. It was an accident, but it was her fault.

She thinks he’d do the same as his father, push her aside and take the fall.

She can’t lose him too, not like that.

Pushing him away doesn’t seem to help, because he comes into too close an orbit, and she’s pulled into him like gravity, like a black hole threatening to consume her whole. She tries to busy herself, but he finds ways to distract her, to bring her close and make her beg for – for – for _something_. She thinks he’d give it, if she asked. Maybe he already has. She doesn’t want it, though, she doesn’t think. She wouldn’t know what to do with it even if she did deserve it.

Valentine, she thinks. What would her parents say?

* * *

When the children in the square finally release him from their games of hopscotch and football, Lucrecia suggests they take a walk out into the woods.

‘There’s some chocobos a bit further north,’ she says as Vincent agrees to it with that same amiable seriousness he always agrees to her ideas. ‘I thought maybe we could take a picnic.’

Something lights up in his eyes, and something not unlike guilt gnaws at her gut. She swallows thickly, turns away, and asks if he’s got any better shoes than those.

It’s not the first time they’ve heard something when they’ve been – well. Occupied. He’s got her shins in his elbows, bending her back in a way that makes him sink so deep she can’t stop shivering, and he balances himself on one hand to press the other to her mouth, her haggard breathing a distraction.

‘Shush,’ he whispers, sharp, and she tries to, honestly.

Taking his hand from her mouth, he pats around the blanket, finds his gun. She licks her lips, curls her fingers into the blanket beneath her, drops her feet slowly down, toes touching the fabric. His hips fidget, and she watches his face, the way his eyes tighten, his jaw sets. His arm is steady as he raises the gun, and his breathing is calm for the sweat on his hairline.

She doesn’t say anything, but she wants to say his name.

They wait for what feels like half a lifetime, and then he puts the gun down.

‘Nothing,’ he breathes, a sigh of relief carrying the word.

Though she had no reason to believe it possible, or likely, the thought of it being Hojo –

She buries her face in his neck and sees the beat of a heart.

* * *

She dreams of the reactor, of the chamber, of Jenova. She dreams of the Ancient staring her down, nose-to-nose with her and finding her lacking.

She wakes crying, heart pounding.

* * *

Saying goodbye feels wrong, out-of-place. Her skin itches, her heart turning over itself. Bile in her belly, and her throat clogged. It’s just homesickness, she tells herself, breathes the smell of her mother in and feels like it’s going to be the last time.

‘Be sure to come again soon,’ she says, and looks at Vincent. ‘You will _always_ be welcome her, Mr Valentine, don’t ever think you’re not.’

His lip wobbles once, and then he licks it, offers her a smile, clipped and serious, if a smile could be that.

‘Thank you, Mrs Crescent. I’ll make sure to keep your daughter in a fit state to return.’

Lucrecia scoffs, rolls her eyes. Not the romantic declaration her mother takes it as, but points for trying.

* * *

He doesn’t ask her about it on the drive home.

He pulls over halfway to drag her into the backseat again. She clutches the headrest behind him, uses it as leverage, and he watches her, eyes hazy but so red.

She wonders what he’s thinking, wonders if he’s elsewhere.

She can’t shake the feeling she’s being watched, can’t shake the yearning in her chest to get back, to see the chamber again, to see if anything’s changed.

Shaking her head, she knots her fingers into his hair, kisses him and rides out the shudder of his body with her own.

* * *

It’s so late that it’s early. She sits outside the Manor and stares at the moon. She understands why people smoke; the pressure behind her eyes is immense.

Despite the months of work, Hojo had torn her thesis to shreds. She’d worked through the night to try and put it right but had ended up throwing the papers across the room with a strangled scream that burnt in her throat, and she stormed out of the Manor, just to get away from it.

She’ll go back after breakfast, and tidy it up, and she’ll make the changes.

But right now, she needs to sit on the steps and stare at the setting moon and think about literally anything else.

There is nothing else, though, not anymore. She is the research, the biotechnology, the petri dishes and notes and ache behind her eyes from staring at the screen for too long. Dr Valentine had forced her to take time away from it, to go into Midgar and swatch lipsticks, try on shoes, whatever she had to do to help her be herself. Hojo is the opposite, demanding more and more and more of her time, her attention, her brain. More and more it feels like he finds her lacking.

‘You’re up late.’

She heaves a breath, shifts her legs to rest her chin on her knees.

‘Leave me alone,’ she says, ‘please.’

Vincent leans against the gate post, elbows and ankles crossed, and he says nothing, stares across the square.

‘You’ve been avoiding me,’ he says eventually.

She picks at her nails.

‘I’ve had a lot to do.’

‘I heard him yelling.’ It’s a quiet admission, and she glances up at him, but he’s not looking at her. ‘You don’t believe him?’

She swallows, looks at her feet, bare in the moonlight. She has a faint red mark across the arches from the straps of her shoes.

‘I don’t know,’ she admits, and Vincent snorts, turns away.

‘You’re an idiot if you do.’

She snorts, wipes the corner of her eye.

‘Thank you,’ she breathes, and he hums. ‘For thinking I’m more than I am.’

He wrinkles his nose, then shakes his head, offers her something close to a smile.

‘Don’t get a big head over it.’

He turns to head back inside, and suggests she get some sleep.

‘You’ll only be moody.’

Rich, coming from him, but it makes her laugh.

* * *

Hojo gives her the card to get into Jenova’s chamber. She doesn’t even ask for it, he just hands it to her and asks her to do some preliminary checks.

‘Gast’s coming by,’ he says, ‘to check on the project. We think we’re ready for the next stage.’

Lucrecia tries to hide her surprise, given that she’d heard nothing about a “next stage,” believing that they were, for the most part, still working out what the cells could do. Hojo waves her off when she hovers for too long, and she goes to find Vincent so he can take her up to the reactor.

He waits in the car, and she mounts the steps alone. The reactor is even more stifling now than it had been the first few times. Her mouth feels dry, her palms sweaty. Her heels clack too loudly against the steel of the stairs.

It feels very much like Jenova stirs at her entry, even though the creature doesn’t move at all. It only has one eye, but it doesn’t even blink, just stares blindly at her as she stands opposite it.

Half a step to the side and the reflection of her face matches the features of Jenova’s, and she stares at it until her eyes burn.

‘What are you?’ she whispers.

A bubble makes its way from the bottom of the tank to the top. Lucrecia breathes, and her breath fogs the glass. She wipes it away, and the reflection of her eyes flash green. She shakes her head, aching like a tight band around her temples, and rubs at the bridge of her nose. Jenova sits there, motionless, unseeing, and watches her.

She stays there until her calves ache, and she looks away from the tank at last, rubs across her forehead, where a headache still lingers. She’s looked at screens for too long, she supposes.

Vincent is outside, pacing back and forth. The sun’s moved in the sky, and she supposes it’s been hours.

‘There you are,’ he says, looks relieved.

‘We’d better get back; I’ve been gone a long time. Longer than I meant to.’

She says nothing on the drive back. He looks at her with a frown as they wind down the mountain path, and she pulls down the sunshade to check her lipstick in the mirror, looks out of the window.

‘Lucrecia,’ he says, but she doesn’t answer him.

* * *

She doesn’t know what to think of Vincent sticking close to her while she buries herself in research. She takes Hojo’s criticisms and rips through her thesis. He tears it apart again, so she spends sleepless nights rewriting it, and then a third time when they have a shouting match so loud that Hollander becomes inclined to get between them, making some quip or another that has Hojo snorting in disgust and Lucrecia screaming like a banshee, whirling away and storming up the stairs. Vincent meets her halfway, and she tries to shove her way past him.

‘Hey,’ he says, gentle, catches her arm. ‘I heard you scream.’

‘Get out of my way,’ she barks, but he holds her fast.

‘Lucy,’ he tries, ducking his head to find her eyes, but she shoves as hard as she can, and the shock of it jolts her arm free, and she’s up the stairs before he can recover.

He bangs on her door, but she’s shoved a chair under it and curled herself into a ball behind the sink and weeps until she can’t weep any more.

* * *

She washes her face, and when she looks up through a splash of water, her eyes shine green, her hair grey. The face is not hers, and she yelps, clutches at her cheekbones. A blink and the image is gone.

‘You’re tired,’ she tells herself, dries her face on a fresh towel, looks up at her reflection again. ‘You’re overworked. Go to sleep.’

 _Yes_ , a whisper curls past her ears. _Sleep_.

She shakes it off, but her skin buzzes, aches.

* * *

Gast calls for a conference in Midgar, and Hojo seems very pleased with this. It’s been nearly a year at the Manor. Lucrecia’s just glad of a change of scenery. Between Nibelheim, the one visit to Mideel, the occasional foray into the wilderness with Vincent, she’s mostly just been in the Manor, and she’s bored. She’d travelled with Dr Valentine, explored the world, and she misses it.

Even if it’s just Midgar, it’s a change of pace.

Either way, Hojo is pleased with the call, and he’s remarkably chipper. He promises to look over Lucrecia’s thesis again during the drive, and he hands it back to her with a tick on the first paragraph, which is high praise. She smiles at it and feels eyes on her. Vincent isn’t looking at her in the rear-view, so she looks out of the window, and sees a flash of green. She jumps, shakes her head.

‘Lucrecia?’

She glances across at Hojo, find him eyeing her like she’s under a microscope.

‘Yes?’

‘Have you enjoyed access to the chamber?’

She blinks at him and catches his gaze flitter across to Vincent for barely a moment. For a second afterward, she thinks he knows. But there’s nothing to know. When Vincent takes her to the reactor, he stays in the car, and she spends hours sat next to the tank, staring at it, staring at Jenova, making notes, reading notes. Sometimes, she talks to the Ancient, but there’s no reply. Because of course there’s no reply. Sometimes, she thinks there’s movement, but it’s just her eyes playing tricks on her. When she eventually drags herself away, there’s no time to fool around. She thinks it’s been weighing on Vincent some, and she can admit to herself that she misses it, a little. She misses sticks digging into her back, stones under her knees. She misses the heat of the backseat of the car, the glass cool and damp under her fingers as she tries to get purchase.

Her ears are burning, and she blinks some more.

‘Yes,’ she says, squeezes her thighs together, masquerades it as a shift of position. Vincent’s gaze flickers to hers in the rear-view. ‘It’s been so interesting to spend time in there. I’ve done what I can to find answers to my questions in the notes, and through my own observations and experiments, but I have a few that don’t have answers yet.’

‘Perhaps I can enlighten you,’ Hojo replies, and leans a little across the seat. ‘Perhaps over dinner?’

Vincent’s eyes feel hot, and she can feel the tension in his shoulders from behind his seat.

‘Yes,’ she says, instead of what she wants to say, which is a plea to stop the car, ‘yes, that would be really good.’

Hojo nods and turns his attention to something else. Lucrecia meets Vincent’s gaze in the mirror, and he looks away.

* * *

About twenty minutes after she gets back to her room from dinner, there’s a knock at the door. She’s naked, about to get in the bath, because the water gets hotter in Midgar than it does in the Manor, and she’s not about to turn down their hospitality, not when she had a couple of hours to herself to go shopping and treat herself to new bath salts, but with a soft groan, she ties her robe tight about her waist and goes to the door. It bangs open as soon as she’s got the catch free and Vincent steps in, slamming it behind him.

‘Excuse me?’ she asks, and tries to straighten her shoulders, but he steps into her so closely that she has to back away, straight into a wall.

Caging her in, he cocks his head, dips it to meet her gaze, hot, heavy, blistering red in the dim table lamp she’s left lit.

‘Vincent,’ she whispers, firm, because she’s twenty, and sure of herself.

‘Lucrecia,’ he replies, presses close, and his breath is hot against her lips.

‘Why are you here?’ she asks.

‘I saw you, in the car,’ he replies, and his fingers trace her face, her ear, her jaw, neck, collar, pushing the robe to the side.

She’d only done the knot loosely, and it unravels with only half a tug. She draws a breath, squares her shoulders.

‘You saw me,’ she says, intends it to come out challenging, a battle, but it comes out at barely a hum, a breath of an exhale.

She shivers at his fingers continuing their exploration, along the curve of her breast, thumb rubbing a contemplative circle that makes her breath catch before the backs of his fingers, rough with grazes, stroke down her sternum, her abdomen, unfurl at her hips, between them.

Watching her eyes, he hums, rubs his nose against hers with a nod.

‘I did,’ he says, and something smug flitters across his features as he strokes one finger, two, finds a rhythm that makes her exhale tremble. ‘When Hojo asked about the reactor, you thought he was asking about this.’

Her eyes close, and she grips his arm, tries to slow his wrist, but he presses a wicked grin into her throat, pushes a knee between hers, crowds her until she’s gasping.

‘You shouldn’t be here,’ she tries, because he shouldn’t be. It would only take one person seeing him leave for her reputation to shred all over again.

‘Then tell me to go,’ he whispers, bites at her ear, adds a third finger.

Her toes curl, her heels lifting.

‘Vincent,’ she breathes, grabs his hair, drags him to her mouth.

It doesn’t take her long to shove his jacket off, to pull at his tie, and he laughs against her mouth when she tries to get his shirt off without looking at the buttons. She focuses instead on his trousers, crowds _him_ back into the wall to drop to her knees. He bangs his head throwing it back, and she shushes him.

‘Ha,’ he pants out, smooths a hand over her scalp before finding whatever part of her he can get purchase on and pulling her up.

Hands dragging down her back, hot and heavy and rough with calluses, he grabs her arse, thighs, hikes her up against him, nearly trips over the trousers around his ankles, carries her to the bed.

‘Was it worth it?’ he asks, fingers loose but firm around her wrists, ‘your answers.’

It startles her, and she lies there, staring up at him, his hair tousled, mouth swollen, eyes so red and hot.

‘What?’ she asks, her heart tripping in her chest as he sits up.

She sees a flash of green, silver, something hateful and angry in her belly turning arousal to bile, and then it’s gone, just as quickly.

‘Dinner,’ he says, so intense, and his grip, on her ankles now, is firm, hot. ‘Was it worth it? He complains about every meal at the Manor.’

‘It wasn’t really a meal,’ she replies, gasping it out as he makes his way up her legs, settles between them.

‘No?’

She adjusts her back, the weight of her spine, and her eyelashes flutter at the warmth of him.

‘No. Mostly just coffee.’

‘You hate coffee,’ he hums, kisses her neck, grips her hip to lift her enough. She braces a foot to help. ‘You must have really wanted those answers.’

She hums, goes to reply, but he takes the breath from her in one roll of his hips.

* * *

He whispers words she doesn’t want to hear into her neck, falling from his mouth in such a rush that she’s not sure he meant to let them out. She finds a way to keep her mouth busy so that she doesn’t have to answer.

* * *

They don’t talk about it, even though his back itches as he shrugs back into his shirt, and she has bites down the length of her neck, little rosebuds of purple and red mottling. She checks that the coast is clear as he ties his laces, and he drags her in for one last searing kiss before he disappears back down the corridor, his hair a little flatter, but otherwise impeccable. Nobody would suspect a thing.

Her mouth aches with the weight of his hand.

The bath’s gone cold, so she drains it and runs another one.

* * *

His words hang heavy in the air, weighing down the silence.

* * *

He’s not at breakfast the next day, but he is outside of the hall where Gast has summoned them for the conference, next to another navy suit, and he’s chatting amiably, as if he didn’t barge his way into her bedroom and tell her he – he –

Lucrecia, clutching a cup of tea from the canteen, and itching with the weight of the makeup on her neck, fights the urge to lick her lips as they lock eyes. Hojo says something next to her, and she leaps as if stung.

‘Yes,’ she says, because that’s what she thinks he wants to hear.

He snorts and passes her into the room.

There isn’t much for her to offer in the way of contribution to the wider discussion at first; Gast hasn’t been on-site with Jenova for months now, but Hojo and Hollander have kept him abreast of the experiments and research, and Hojo calls on her when talk turns to the impact Jenova’s cells have on the status of other human cells.

‘She seems to neutralise some effects, and exponentially increase others,’ she says, and goes on to explain her petri dishes and her months of observations.

Then talk turns back to things she’d hadn’t been privy to, working on her thesis or skiving with Vincent. Her head hurts, and she massages her temples. They’ve been in here for hours already, and she’s tired, and hungry, and sitting for so long is making her pelvis ache. Something deep inside her, in a place she can’t name, pulses with the beat of a heart that isn’t hers, longs for whatever Vincent had given her. Whatever he offered, whatever it was he had whispered to her, whatever that had contained. Her not-heartbeat aches for it, and she feels cold.

‘I think we’re ready to begin human trials,’ Hojo says, and she snaps back to attention.

Human trials? What human trials, who mentioned human trials?

Hollander wants to trial injecting cells into a person, and seeing if those cells will transpose onto offspring, or can be passed across again. Hojo wants to inject into a foetus directly.

The words come out of her mouth before she can stop them.

‘I’ll do it,’ she says.

All eyes whip around to her, and she almost blushes. She swallows, picks at her nails around the cup she’s clutching.

‘I’ll do it,’ she repeats, looks at Hojo. ‘The foetus way. I’ll do it.’

He watches her for a moment, his glasses glinting in the harsh overheads.

‘Hm,’ he says, and turns his gaze back to Gast, who looks at her with something like sadness.

At the end of the conference, which she admittedly doesn’t listen to much of, Gast calls for her to stay.

‘Lucrecia,’ he says, ‘you – you _understand_ , don’t you, what this entails?’

‘Artificial insemination is not new technology, Professor,’ she says, glib, which only draws more attention to the shake of her hands.

He leans on the desk, folds his arms, looks at her with a flat expression. His moustache is still very impressive, and she breathes deep into her belly.

‘No,’ he agrees, ‘it’s not. But the – Lucrecia, the pressure it will put on you will be immense. We don’t know what the cells will do to a person, never mind what it’ll do to a foetus. For all we know, it could kill you.’

She shakes her head, picks at her nails.

‘With all due respect, Professor, all of our research so far indicates a massive healing potential. Add in that I grew up in Mideel, where the Lifestream is close to the surface, and its impact on the waters in the hot springs is something my father uses as part of his recovery process for any of his patients that need it, and – I think I am the best-suited candidate.’

Because there was a list, clearly. Let your unborn baby be experimented on, application forms available at reception.

Gast does not look convinced, and she looks at her feet, knocks her toes together.

‘Professor,’ she says, softly. ‘I’m a scientist. I know what I’m getting into, and I know what the outcome will be. If it’s artificially inseminated, it isn’t – it isn’t like I’ll be attached to it. It’s a stranger’s baby. If we could grow it outside of the womb, we would, but we’re not there yet.’

She offers him a smile, but it feels vapid as it stretches across her cheeks.

Gast sighs, shakes his head.

‘I can’t talk you out of it,’ he says, ‘you’re a grown adult. I just want you to be sure.’

She nods.

‘I’m sure.’

* * *

Vincent is outside when she leaves, and he walks with her back to her room. She doesn’t say anything, and he doesn’t ask about the conference. She unlocks her door, looks back at him, but he’s already turning to walk back down the corridor.

* * *

Hojo and Hollander bicker the entire way back to the Manor. Vincent drives in silence. Lucrecia stares out of the window and ignores all three of them.

* * *

She misses her period, but it’s not the first time, so she doesn’t think anything of it.

* * *

It takes a month or so before Hojo has everything ready. He doesn’t include Lucrecia in the planning, and she grits her teeth about it. She’d like to know, of course she would! But Hojo keeps the doors to his lab locked, and she’d rather chew off her own feet than spend time with Hollander, so instead she ignores Vincent and walks up to the reactor. The fresh air does her some good, and the ache in her belly by the time she gets to the chamber just reminds her that she hasn’t eaten breakfast and now it’s well past lunch.

‘I suppose,’ she says to the silent face opposite her, hiding inside her reflection, ‘that I’ll have to take better care of myself, if I’m going to have your baby.’

She supposes that’s what she is. A surrogate mother, using her eggs but fertilising them with someone else’s DNA.

Her hands come to rest on her belly, flat enough. For now, anyway. Soon it will swell, and she’d never really wanted to be a mother.

When she gets back, Vincent shoots her a look, but she ignores it, and goes to the phone, calls home.

‘Ah!’ her mother exclaims on answering, ‘I was about to call you! We wanted to let you know when you came to visit, but we just weren’t sure yet.’

Lucrecia wrinkles her nose with a laugh. ‘Sure about what? It’s not like you to keep secrets! What’s Dad done this time? Don’t tell me he’s invented a new medicine by accident.’

‘Well, accident is right!’ her mother chimes, and Lucrecia feels her heart drop out through her stomach, knows what’s coming before she’s even said it. ‘We weren’t planning on it, but we got the confirmation last week, and – phew! You’re going to have a baby sister!’

Lucrecia licks her lips, swallows. She opens her mouth, but nothing comes out for several tries.

Finally, she forces a smile onto her face, and says, ‘that’s really good, Mum. I hope – I hope it all goes well for you.’

‘You’ll come and see her, won’t you?’ Hersilia asks, and Lucrecia can hear the frown in her voice.

By her admittedly too-quick maths, when the baby is born, Lucrecia will be pregnant, well into her second trimester, most likely, and it is not how she wants her parents to find out. To know what she’s agreed to. It’s for the good of science, and she’ll be respected, but she can’t do it to them like that.

‘Yeah,’ she says, hears it tremble and hopes her mother doesn’t. ‘Yeah, uh. When I get some free time. We’re in the – middle – of some really important stuff here.’

Her mother tuts. ‘Don’t let it consume you, darling,’ she advises, like it’s that easy. ‘You’re so like your father; he’d never leave the clinic if I didn’t make him. Say, how that’s nice young man of yours?’

Vincent comes stomping past as if summoned, splattered with blood.

‘Wolf,’ he says, in response to her raised eyebrows. ‘Came in off the mountain.’

‘He’s fine,’ she says, ‘but, you know he’s not – we’re not.’

Hersilia snorts and tells her to keep on lying to herself.

‘You must think I don’t know you at all!’ she laughs, and they say their farewells.

Lucrecia goes to her room and sits on her bed and stares at her hands for several minutes.

 _Whore_ , whispered behind her ears in a way that makes her shudder. She shakes her head clear, tension behind her eyes.

* * *

Hojo talks her through the process early in the morning, and she stares at the screen as he talks. There are readouts of cells, clusters of them. Sperm.

‘Do you understand?’ he asks, and she nods, because she read up on the process last night.

‘Are you qualified for the procedure?’ she asks in return.

‘Idiot girl,’ he snaps, and whirls about, thinking he’s dramatic, but he’s thirty-two and developing an irreparable hunch.

He’s between her legs, and she’s gritting her teeth against the intrusion and the examinations ShinRa had insisted upon after she passed the exam hadn’t hurt like this, when abruptly he stops. Sits back.

‘Well,’ he says, and she snarls at him between her knees.

‘What?’ she demands, because she wants this over with.

He looks at her, and she stares back, and he says nothing, looks back at what he’s doing. She twists her head to look at the screen, the readouts from his instruments.

‘What?’ she demands again, but she doesn’t get a reply.

* * *

She sleeps it off, waddling up the stairs and slapping Vincent’s attempts at guiding hands away from her.

‘I just want to be alone,’ she snaps, and he looks taken aback.

He doesn’t know. He _doesn’t know_.

She sleeps, and she sleeps, and she sleeps, and she wakes only to be sick, barely making it to the toilet in time.

In her pyjamas, sore and aching and clutching at the railing for balance, she staggers down the stairs, her mouth full of bile, and slams the door to the lab open.

‘Ah,’ Hojo says, whirling in his chair to face her. ‘There you are. Sit down. We need to talk.’

She wavers, her eyes aching, and then sits.

The lab stinks of – there isn’t a name she can put to it, but she knows it’s the smell of her, and Jenova, and what happened.

‘I’ve been looking over your thesis,’ he says, ‘and I think it’s ready for publication.’

It’s not what she expected him to say. She flounders. Blinks, mouths silent sounds, presses her hands to her womb.

‘You do?’ she asks, quiet, a breath, a whisper.

Hojo nods, turns back to his computer. ‘I believe there is a good case to be made. I’ll submit it in the morning, and if Gast agrees, your accreditation should arrive by the end of the week.’

It’s a dismissal. She blinks. Staggers to her feet, stumbles to her knees. Hojo tuts and goes to the intercom.

‘Valentine,’ he says, ‘come and collect Dr Crescent and escort her back to her room.’

She uses the table to get to her feet, but her knees hurt, her back, her skull.

‘Pathetic,’ he sighs, and turns back to his computer, taps at the keyboard. ‘Weaker than I thought.’

‘I am _not_ weak,’ she spits, but it sounds pitiful.

Vincent appears at the doorway a few moments later, holds her arms gently as they make their way up the stairs.

‘You don’t look well,’ he says, and she snorts, gags.

‘It’ll pass,’ she replies, and he helps her into her room.

* * *

The morning sickness comes sooner than she expected it to. Vincent eyes her at every opportunity, and it makes her itch, feel sick to her core. She asks him to take her to the reactor, and the band of tension around her head tightens down into her throat so much that she has to pull the handbrake to throw herself out of the car and throw up.

‘Tell me what it is,’ he says, combing her fringe back with his fingers. ‘Lucrecia, please.’

Her lip wobbles, and he helps her upright, meets her eyes. So gentle. So gentle.

 _Rip them out_.

Her nails dig into his arms at the force of the thought, her knees buckling. He takes her weight, still so gentle.

‘Lucy,’ he says, and it bursts out of her before she can stop it.

‘I’m pregnant,’ she gasps.

He freezes. His eyes go wide. Neither of them breathes.

‘Mine?’ he asks, and she takes a breath, two, three.

‘No,’ she says.

She could have punched him clean on the nose and he’d have been less shocked. The devastation tears through her, and she crumbles.

Though he could, _should_ , leave her, he pulls her in, holds her close.

‘Okay,’ he says, and she feels bile in her womb.

* * *

She can’t sleep. Her dreams are – uncomfortable. Hot. Cold. Violent. Empty.

Something in her bones, aching to escape.

She sits awake and stares at the moon and throws up.

When she looks in the mirror, her reflection is not her own, too sharp, too monstrous, grey and green and bubbling.

‘This is important work,’ she tells herself. ‘It’s important work. It’ll bring about – it’ll bring change, to the medical community. To the way we help people.’

ShinRa want the information for more power, she knows this. The key to the Promised Land is in the Ancients’ bloodstream, and she doesn’t pretend to understand or care about how they’ll get it. She cares about what Ancient cells can do to help people, make them better.

And people will respect her for this, for the sacrifices she’s making in the name of science. She’s giving everything that a woman should be, should want, should strive for. She’s giving it all.

It has to be worth it.

* * *

At the first scan, Lucrecia looks at the data, and uses her common sense, and she comes to a conclusion that brings tears to her eyes.

‘Is this right?’ she asks, froggish, and Hojo looks at her with the apathetic hatred that she’s come to expect from him.

‘I don’t make mistakes,’ he tells her. ‘Unlike some scientists, I take great pride in the authenticity of my work.’

‘My work is not inauthentic,’ she replies, and he laughs.

He laughs and he laughs and he laughs, and she feels the ache behind her ears, the beat of a heart that isn’t hers.

‘Idiot girl,’ he says, gets so close to her that she can count the flecks of venom in his eyes. ‘I will say this once. You will be ruined if you talk about this. To use another man’s baby when you cannot be sure of the outcome! You will be the most hated woman to ever grace the scientific community.’

She swallows her sobs, stares at him with as much hatred as she can muster.

‘You’re lying,’ she says. ‘You can’t know that.’

He stares at her, waits her out.

‘What do I do?’ she asks, when the silence gnaws on her bones, tears at her seams.

‘We, the Science Department, are only interested in your child. You read the contract, yes? You understand what you have agreed to.’

She takes a breath.

‘What do I do?’ she repeats.

‘For your security,’ he says, and he almost sounds _kind_. ‘And for your parents’ peace of mind, should anything happen to you, you will need to have an acknowledged stake in the proceedings.’

‘I am the baby’s mother,’ she says, firm, ‘I cannot be more acknowledged.’

‘Are you sure about that?’

He explains it very simply; the easiest way for her to have her position secured on the project is for her to sign her name to him, marry him, and he will ensure that she not only has access to the child, but security for herself and her parents. He understands that her mother is pregnant.

‘They have no part in this.’

‘You cannot see them until after you have given birth,’ he tells her, and she bites the back of her lips.

‘Why would you – you can’t stop me.’

‘Valentine has his orders that you are not to leave Nibelheim,’ Hojo tells her, ‘for your safety.’

‘You think I wouldn’t come back?’

‘I would hate for something to happen to you if you did,’ he replies.

She tries to stare him down, but the light shines off his glasses and she has to blink, look away. She tips her head back, shuts her eyes, concentrates on the feeling of the tears working their way down her face, wet in her ear when it finds its way there.

‘Okay,’ she says.

She drops her head, swipes her under eye, blinks the mascara away.

‘Okay?’

‘I’ll do it. So that I can see him afterwards.’

‘See who?’ Hojo asks, eyebrows arched.

Her lip curls, but she bites back the bile.

* * *

Her hair begins to fall out, coming out in clumps whenever she brushes it, and she stares at the strands tangled into the brush, and she can admit to herself that she cries. When she looks in the mirror, it hardly looks noticeable, and no matter how much falls out, it looks no different. She wonders, sometimes, looking at what feels like half her scalp in the bristles, whether she should cut it off.

But Vincent had said once that he liked her hair, and if it looks no different, she’ll just. Close her eyes when she brushes it. It’s going grey anyway. Sometimes, if she looks at it wrong.

* * *

She knows when her parents get the letter because the phone rings. Vincent, pacing and hunched and aggressive, a caged animal, snatches it from the cradle.

‘ShinRa Manor,’ he barks, and Lucrecia picks at her toast.

Gast, still horrified at her decision, has sent her a dietary plan for the next nine months, to ensure she gets enough of the right nutrients. He said, in his covering letter, that he believed her sensible enough to eat well, but he wanted to give her the best possible chance. He added, in a postscript, that he’s not convinced of Hojo’s findings, but that he’s deferring the decision to her.

Vincent thrusts the phone at her, and she rears back.

‘Your mother,’ he snaps, and stomps out.

‘That poor boy,’ Hersilia says, morose and not a little bit disappointed.

‘I wouldn’t expect you to understand it,’ Lucrecia says, and swallows back the bitterness that threatens to spill out of her, the secrets. ‘But it makes sense.’

‘Sense!’ Hersilia crows, ‘when has my daughter ever spoken sense! You and your father are so alike! Not a lick of sense between you! You had _everything_ you could have wanted in that boy, and you – your father is unimpressed.’

Lucrecia can feel the tears welling, but she scrubs her eyes, takes a breath so that her voice doesn’t waver when she says, ‘he can be unimpressed. I did the right thing, even if it doesn’t look like it.’

‘He _loves_ you,’ Hersilia says, and Lucrecia hangs up on her.

* * *

One day, during a walk, she took a moment, while he was distracted buying drinks at the café, she turned, left, and headed for the gates. When he caught up to her, he grabbed her arms, pulled her in so that he didn’t have to raise his voice above a whisper and told her what the President himself had granted authorisation for him to do should she threaten Project S in any way. She had stared at him and had seen truth in his eyes where she could only see lies in hers.

Hojo had sneered at her on her return to the lab, and asked if she understood it yet.

She hadn’t dignified him with an answer, but the lab had looked more like a cage than ever.

* * *

Just a few months ago, stress and tension could have been solved in the backseat of the car, or on a cosy plateau with a picnic blanket and a bottle of wine she still can’t legally buy, but by the scans, she’s bordering her fourth month, and there’s no disguising it now. Vincent avoids her and clings to her in equal measure, pacing about like a trapped animal, wild in its cage, and she avoids and clings to him in turn.

Starting week six, she becomes forgetful, leaving things in stupid and dangerous places, and he spends most of his time watching her with the kind of curiosity one watches a creature in a zoo, then following after her, picking up precariously placed objects and remaking her the cups of tea she neglects. When she craves strange and weird things, off he goes to fetch or make them, and though Hojo gives her looks he thinks are significant, or snide, or whatever, she steadfastly ignores them, cries about it late in the evening when she’s alone.

When she gets the phone call to tell her that her sister has been born, named for some ancient lady of power and intelligence, the same way she had been, she’s sat outside, staring up at the mountain, the direction of the reactor.

‘Lucrecia,’ Vincent says, ‘there’s a phone call for you.’

She glances back, nods, looks back towards the reactor. Doesn’t move.

‘Lucrecia,’ he says again, ‘phone.’

She doesn’t turn this time, keeps staring.

He makes an excuse and sets the phone on the side, comes to her at the bench, rounds it to break her line of sight. She startles, stares up at him.

‘Vincent!’ she exclaims, ‘oh! Hello.’

‘There’s a phone call for you,’ he says, and there’s a gentle worry in his eyes. ‘Your mother, I think it’s to announce your sister. She sounds very chipper.’

Chipper. Nobody says chipper.

‘Okay,’ she breathes, and sets a hand on her belly as she pushes herself up.

Her head swims, and she chokes. His arms come around her, hold her up, hold her safe, and she shivers, shakes, loses her footing. She clutches his arm, the only thing she can get into her grip, and he slowly helps her down, brushes her hair from her face.

‘You look – you look like shit,’ he tells her, because that is fair. ‘What aren’t you telling me?’

She pants into his hands, her eyes sore, struggling to stay open. She aches in places she didn’t know she had. The baby is too small to kick, but it feels like it’s writhing, turning over and over, and she holds it gently, tries to soothe it, but it won’t go.

‘Nothing,’ she lies, blatant. ‘I’m fine.’

‘Stop lying to me,’ he says, and helps her upright.

Her mother suspects nothing, so enamoured of this new arrival that she can’t hear the wheeze in Lucrecia’s chest, the ache under her tongue.

‘I’ll send you pictures,’ Hersilia promises, before they say their goodbyes.

Lucrecia puts the phone back in its cradle and turns to find Vincent watching her.

‘Leave me alone,’ she sighs, and shoves past him to go back to the lab.

* * *

A letter addressed to her comes through the letterbox separate to the usual post. Hollander tosses it at her during dinner, says he found it on the doorstep.

‘You must have a fan,’ he chortles, and Lucrecia shoots him a look.

The letter isn’t handwritten, because these things never are. It’s cut from newspaper clippings, and her name is spelled wrong.

‘They always spell it with a T,’ she murmurs to herself, because otherwise she’ll have to acknowledge that she’s an abomination and a whore.

‘Ignore it,’ Vincent tells her later, shrugging out of his jacket to drape over her shoulders, because it’s cold outside in the evenings, and she’s in the thinnest blouse. ‘They don’t know you.’

‘And you do?’ she asks, glances up at him.

It hurts too much to wear heels now, the weight in her belly so slight and yet so exhausting. There’s a weight on her back that she can’t describe, like she’s carrying a whole world on her shoulders. It doesn’t make her much shorter, but it’s enough that she has to look up.

He offers her a smile that she wants to rip from his face, irrationally, terrifyingly, and she looks away from it. His fingers brush hers, feel like a naked flame.

‘I know you pretty well,’ he agrees, a little lighter than she thinks is necessary. He’s making jokes, and she hates him for it. ‘But nobody can tell you who you are except for you. You’re the only person who really knows you.’

She thinks of her reflection, and how she hears whispers in a voice not hers, and she wishes he were right.

* * *

The first seizure comes when she’s alone. She’s not sure it is a seizure, or if it’s just a poor sense of time, lost to a nap she didn’t expect to take. But she goes from being on her feet, looking in the mirror, to on the floor, blood in her mouth and smeared across her face. There’s blood on the edge of the sink. Her face hurts.

She struggles to her feet, brain turning this way and that, her heart pounding in her throat.

‘Fire,’ she breathes, to the porcelain of the sink, ‘I saw fire.’

It takes her some time to clean the blood from her face, to find a potion in the cupboard to take the gash away, though it stays angry and red and inflamed, just visible beneath the damp edge of her fringe. Fire, and ash, and the angriest pair of eyes she’s ever seen. So full of hate. Loathing.

She knows those eyes as those of her son.

Son.

She doesn’t know the sex yet, but she knows it to be her son, her baby boy.

* * *

‘Are you sure this is what you want?’

He’d asked it early in the morning, when he’d let himself into her room to find her throwing up again, blood in her vomit and streaming from her nose.

It was early still, early enough that she could go back.

Except it wasn’t. It’s too late, and she can’t go back now.

‘I’m sure,’ she chokes out, because she has to pretend, at least to him, if not herself.

* * *

She wakes up with blood in her mouth, and she spits it out in the sink, stares at a reflection that’s not her own.

It’s not supposed to be like this. Her father specialised in end-of-life care, but occasionally terrified girls came to them in the middle of the night, soaked with blood or their bellies swollen to bursting, and he did what he had to, and she knows enough to know that this isn’t right. Hojo tells her she’s imagining it, that this is just what it’s like, and she wouldn’t know, because she’s an idiot girl at the best of times, but the hormones are addling her.

This isn’t how it’s supposed to go.

* * *

‘It’s a human baby,’ he tries next, and she’s overcome by a fit of rage so strong, and confusion so wide that for a moment she doesn’t know where she is, only that she’s angry, and that she’s in pain.

Angry because he knows, angry because he didn’t know soon enough. So, _so_ angry.

He takes whatever she can throw at him, and chides her for her aim with a chair, and holds her face in his hands. His skin is warm, a blanket of calm. He’s so like his father in some moments, and so very different in others. His face swims; she’s crying.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she sobs, and he draws her into his chest, holds her close.

‘It’s your baby,’ he tells her crown, and she sobs.

‘I know what I’m doing,’ she tells him.

‘Are you sure?’

* * *

She lies awake and stares at the wall, knows the reactor, knows _Jenova_ , is just beyond the wall, the mountain on the other side of it.

She’s sure. This is the right thing. This is for the good of the planet. ShinRa’s power aside. They could help people, make them safe. Healthy. She can do this for them.

* * *

Hojo is very pleased with how things are going. Vincent stares at her from wherever he positions himself. Hollander is in and out of the Manor, checking on his experiment. Lucrecia spends a lot of time bent over the toilet. Food doesn’t seem to stay down, no matter how much she tries. She emails Gast, asks if there’s another diet plan she can follow.

He tells her that he’s looking into something, and he’ll be with her as soon as he’s figured it out.

Vincent asks if she’d like something from the café, and she tells him to get fucked, so surprised at herself that she bursts into tears. He doesn’t stay for her to apologise, brings her the tea he brought her that very first time. His nails are dirtier than before, blood in his knuckles.

* * *

Vincent catches her arm as she makes her way to the kitchen and drags her into a side room.

‘Why did you marry him?’ he asks.

It’s been weeks, if not months, since the, admittedly incredibly hastily fast-tracked marriage certificate had come through. They’d had exactly three cards of congratulations, one from Gast and one from Hollander and a perfunctory one from the President.

He’s not mentioned it until now, and she’s tired.

‘Because I had to,’ she snaps. ‘I am giving _everything_ for this project, what more is it if I marry him?’

‘But _why_?’

She looks at him, his eyes so intense, red and beautiful and not hers, and she staggers, knows the shape for what they are, has seen them so many times now in her dreams, so full of hate and poison green.

‘Because I’m the reason he’s dead,’ she snarls, and tries to yank herself free of his grip, but fails miserably. ‘Your father. I’m the reason he’s dead, and I owe – I owe Professor Hojo _everything_. He saved my career from the scandal of what I did, and I – I’m protected, with this.’

‘Protected?’ Vincent asks, because of course that’s what he focuses on.

‘Listen to me!’ she cries, far louder than she needs to given how close he is. She clutches his lapels, drags him so close she can smell the toothpaste still on his teeth. Her stomach rolls, but she swallows the bile and focuses on the sensation of his nose brushing hers with every exhale. ‘Listen to me! When I was nineteen, I made a terrible mistake, and it cost your father his life. If Professor Hojo hadn’t helped me, I would have been accused of murder. He agreed to take me on as his student, he’s given me my career.’

‘It’s his baby,’ Vincent murmurs, and the disgust is everything she could have wanted.

‘If that’s what you need to hear!’ she begs, feels like she’s coming apart at the seams. ‘Yes! It’s his baby!’

He’ll be the father on paper, anyway, because there needs to be one.

‘Lucy,’ he says, lets go of one arm to touch her face, the back of his fingers so tender against her cheek that she can barely tell she’s crying.

The pain comes so suddenly that she can’t even scream. Her legs give out, her body wracked with tremors, and Vincent does his best to support her, get her down onto the floor and flat, but he doesn’t know what to do. She sees her son again, so hateful. She sees _her_ , she sees Jenova, the hateful, spiteful face, so angry, so bitter, in place of her own, warped across her son’s beautiful, beautiful features. He should have his father’s eyes. He doesn’t have hers either, but he’s so angry. So hurt.

He’s going to do terrible things.

When she comes out of it, her mouth is full of blood and bile, and Vincent helps her spit it out, uses his cuff to wipe her lips. It’s not the first time he’s had her lipstick on his sleeve, but never like this.

_Bad Reputation_. It feels so long ago.

‘Stop lying to me,’ he says, firm, holds her face so she has to look at him, his thumbs rubbing the salt from under her eyes.

She opens her mouth to protest, but she can’t think of anything to say. She closes her eyes and rests her face in his hands, lets him take her weight.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she breathes.

He looks at her, and she can’t tell if he’s angry with her. She wishes she could read his mind, his eyes are so blank, so without description.

‘You can’t keep doing this,’ he says, and she doesn’t need to ask what.

‘It’s too late to go back,’ she tells him, breathes it into the heel of his hand.

‘I’m not stupid, this is _killing_ you.’

But that’s the strangest part of all of this, and the thing that she can’t make sense of. Her vitals are fine. Her heart is pounding in her chest, her ribs aching with the effort of her breathing, she’s bleeding and her head hasn’t stopped swimming once, and she can barely string a thought together, but her vitals are all fine. Better than ever, even.

‘I’m fine,’ she tries, her hand on his arm, as soft as she can.

‘Stop lying!’ The yell comes so loud that it echoes inside her brain long after it’s stopped echoing around the room.

His chest heaves with the weight of his exhale, and a twist to his lips gives away what he’s glaring at the doorway for.

‘No,’ she begs, clutches at his lapels. ‘No, Vincent, _don’t_. Don’t.’

‘You _can’t_ keep doing this, Lucy,’ he breathes, and he can’t keep calling her that, he _can’t_.

‘Don’t call me that.’

It’s desperate, and he looks at her, fury like fire in the shadows of his eyes, and she knows in that moment that he was right. When he’d whispered into her neck, three words she’d not wanted to hear, he’d meant them. He’d known them, and he’d meant them.

‘Why?’ he spits, his nose wrinkling with the sneer on his mouth. ‘Is that what _he_ calls you?’

‘No,’ she chokes, ‘no, it’s what – it’s what – it’s what Dr Valentine called me.’

It hits him harder than she could have imagined it would. Harder, even, than the admission of her part in his death.

‘What?’ It’s barely audible above the rush of blood in her ears. She can taste it in her gums.

‘Don’t argue with him,’ she says instead, because she can’t bear to repeat it. ‘It’s not – it won’t help.’

He watches her face, and she can feel her lip wobbling, her jaw too tight and too loose, like all of her teeth are loose in her gums.

‘Don’t,’ she whispers, and he nods, collapses forward into her, foreheads knocking together.

* * *

Vincent disappears for a day, two, three. She’s not sure if he’s gone, or just avoiding her. His door is locked, and she can’t find any sign of him around, no plates or bowls or mugs, no gunpowder or pens. She traipses about the Manor for the entirety of the third morning, looking for anything to suggest he’s gone. She doesn’t dare ask Hojo.

She’s in the lab when he comes back, but she doesn’t know that, because Professor Gast is in the doorway, watching her write out her latest vision, because that’s what she’s determined they must be, and the only way to stop thinking about them is to write them down, purge them.

She can’t bare the glare of the computer screens; it makes her sick.

‘Lucrecia,’ Gast says, and she nearly falls from her chair.

He laughs, kindly, and apologises. She clutches her heart, steadies herself with a hand on her womb, pants and breathes through it.

‘Valentine wasn’t wrong,’ Gast sighs, coming into the lab proper. ‘He said you’d weren’t looking well. From the scans and tests Hojo’s been sending me, you’d think you were better than ever.’

‘You spoke to Vincent?’ she asks and hates how desperate she sounds.

‘He fetched me from Midgar,’ he says, ‘I could have asked one of the others, but he sounded like he needed the errand.’

Her lip wobbles. So he hadn’t left.

Not yet, anyway.

She picks at her nails, stares into her lap.

‘Why are you here?’ she asks, brightly, when she remembers that Professor Gast is right in front of her, having been fetched from Midgar.

‘I need to speak to you both,’ he says, ‘Hojo and yourself. And Hollander, if he’s around.’

She shakes her head. ‘No, he’s been gone a few days, on an errand, he said.’

Gast hums, looks disappointed. She wonders where Hollander is.

‘Where’s Hojo?’

‘At the reactor,’ she says, ‘he should be back soon. He wanted to get another reading on Jenova, to compare it with mine. He’s theorising about the balance of hormones, whether they’re synchronising. I’ve been having – headaches.’

‘Seizures, Valentine called them.’

She juts her jaw, her knuckles cracking under the force of her fists clenching against her thighs. ‘He did, did he? He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. They’re headaches. But sometimes I get what I think are visions. Images of the future. We wonder if they aren’t a manifestation of the Cetra’s power.’

‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,’ Gast says, and draws up a chair. ‘Valentine told me that you’re forgetful now, that you lose track of time and place and that you’re obsessing. You were always focused, but not like this. He says you spend hours in the reactor with Jenova, that even if you aren’t there, you’ll sit and stare in its direction. And that’s to say nothing of the sickness.’

She stares at his tie. It’s a very ugly one, the wrong shade of brown, clashing with his tan shirt and caramel trousers. It makes her want to throw up.

‘He talks like he knows me.’

‘I believe he knows you better than anyone else. His job here is to supervise you, Lucrecia, to supervise the project. He believes it’s dangerous, and I am inclined to agree.’

He was here to spy on them, to watch them? To – to run back to the office and tell tales on them? She’d told him things she’d never told anyone else, and she’d snuck him into the lab once or twice, when she was sure Hojo wasn’t there, and they’d – they’d – she’d had to throw some of the papers out after copying them, because they’d been too obviously crumpled.

Had he reported that? Reported what she’d done? Did he – how much did he know about the project?

‘Lucrecia,’ Gast says, gentle and firm, the same kind of calm that Dr Valentine had had, and he takes her hands in his, squeezes. ‘Look at me, you’re alright. You’re alright. Breathe. You’re not breathing, and that’s not good for you.’

She’s calm again by the time Hojo returns, and Gast is encouraging her to sip at a cup of water.

‘Gast,’ Hojo says, scuttling through the door like he owns it. ‘The boy said you were here.’

Lucrecia tries not to, but she hates her husband.

‘Yes, I have a – a rather troubling thing to talk about.’

‘The pregnancy is progressing perfectly fine,’ Hojo says, before he can say anything else. ‘She has symptoms in line with normal pregnancies, but we think it is just her body adjusting to Ancient DNA.’

‘That’s just it, though,’ Gast says, shaking his head. ‘It isn’t Ancient DNA.’

Lucrecia stares at him, her hands protective over her belly, as it to stop the baby from hearing.

‘What do you mean?’ she asks, so quietly she hopes he hasn’t heard.

‘I mean,’ Gast says, looking at her sadly. ‘That Jenova is not an Ancient as we first thought. We mis-translated the text, and Grim, Planet grant him rest, wasn’t here to check our work. We got it wrong. Jenova isn’t the Cetra we thought it was, it’s the opposite.’

‘She is an Ancient,’ Lucrecia protests, mutely, but there’s a buzzing in her head, an anger, a confusion. ‘She has to be.’

Gast shakes his head. ‘No, Lucrecia.’

Hojo snickers, then laughs, then guffaws, clutching at his ribs as he rocks back and forth on his feet. He looks like a lunatic, a madman. Lucrecia rubs at her temples, tries to rid herself of the urge to tear his tongue out, the anger so harsh in her chest that it burns. Could just be heartburn, she’s had a lot of that, too.

‘You are wrong,’ Hojo laughs, ‘if she isn’t an Ancient, then what is she?’

Gast heaves a breath. ‘I don’t know. I’ve been trying to find out, but the texts we have aren’t very clear about it. Something about a calamity? I don’t know the language as well as Grim did, and without him.’

He rolls his shoulders as if shrugging, and he looks between them.

‘We need to stop the project. We were working on the assumption we were using Cetran cells, and even then, it was a gamble. We cannot continue now, not when we don’t know what we’re dealing with.’

Lucrecia shakes her head.

‘No!’ It’s loud, louder than a sensible woman would have said it, but she’s done it now, and she clutches her belly as she leaps to her feet, wavering at the rush of blood. ‘No, we can’t stop now. It’s – you’ve seen my scans, my tests. I’m fine, and we – we’ve already shown what the Jenova cells can do!’

‘Lucrecia, it could kill you.’

The silence hangs heavy between them. Hojo shuffles about, but for a moment, Lucrecia forgets he exists. She’s trapped in Gast’s expression, so familiar to her, so full of understanding and desperate desire to just _stop her_ that she’d seen on her father’s face so many years ago, on Dr Valentine’s.

‘Then let it,’ she says with a shuddering breath, wipes her nose and finds blood on her fingertips. ‘If that’s the price to pay, then I’ll pay it.’

Gast’s mouth drops open, and he shakes his head. ‘Lucrecia – what are you hoping to get from this? We don’t know what Jenova is, what it could do. What it could do to your baby.’

She knows this, feels the shock of it in her marrow, but she keeps her face as straight as she can. She reminds herself that the scientific relevance, the importance of their discoveries, the things that this could mean for the community, the planet at large, that’s what this is about. She will live up to Dr Valentine’s estimation of her, and it will only cost her everything.

‘I knew what I was signing up for,’ she says, sniffles.

Gast shakes his head again, looks disappointed.

‘You won’t stop?’ he asks.

For a moment, she wavers, her gaze flickering to Hojo, even though he’s too far behind her for her to see. But Gast sees it, and whatever he makes of their wedding, hasty as it was, the sudden announcement of her pregnancy, the bump that is clearly too big for the month she’s at, whatever he makes of that, he says nothing about it.

‘No,’ she says.

‘Then the only thing for me to do is to hand in my resignation,’ Gast says, with a slump to his shoulders that he quickly levels again.

It will leave the department in turmoil, and the two senior ranking scientists are already at each other’s throats. It will be a blood bath. He knows it, Lucrecia can see it in his face. She’ll be a casualty in the middle of it. Her thesis hasn’t been approved, and if Gast leaves, he won’t be able to. Hojo had said he’d do it, but it has to run past Gast, and he’d not approved it. Had there been something in it, she wonders later, staring at the ceiling, had she made a note of something she’d observed that had tipped him off, made him reconsider? Had she known, in her gut, that something was wrong, before any of this began?

‘Hand in your resignation?’ Lucrecia echoes, and Hojo begins to chortle.

‘Go ahead, Professor,’ he says, ‘I am more than ready to pick up where you’re leaving off.’

Gast shakes his head and turns on his heel to leave. There’s nothing else he can say, and so there’s no point wasting his breath.

* * *

Hojo says nothing for the rest of the afternoon. Lucrecia continues writing up her notes, trying her best to focus on them and not let Gast’s words ring about her head like a bell, but it’s no good.

‘I suppose you need feeding,’ Hojo says eventually, and she blinks at him.

‘What?’

‘Food,’ he says, ‘you consume it for nutrients. Though by the state of you, I doubt you do.’

He watches her eat every fucking day, and she wants to tell him that. Wants to tell him about the constant burn in her throat from it coming straight back up again, and if it manages to stay down, it goes through her faster than she thinks digestion works. But she says nothing about that, or about the ache in her teeth, the blood in her gums from brushing and brushing and _fucking brushing_.

‘I suppose it’s about that time,’ she agrees, and caps her pen.

Vincent comes storming in before she’s finished staring into the cupboard hopelessly, not wanting to cook, and not wanting to eat, and not knowing what to do regardless.

‘You have to stop,’ he demands, focus entirely upon Hojo.

‘Don’t be ignorant, boy,’ Hojo snorts. ‘And don’t pretend to have any power over our decisions. We are scientists. You are the last person to lecture me on what I should do.’

 _Me_ , she thinks, staring at a box of macaroni. _I_. She isn’t even acknowledged. The mother, the one that makes this whole thing possible, and she’s not a factor in his decision.

‘I heard Professor Faremis,’ Vincent says, too loud, too angry. ‘I heard what he said. About how it could kill Dr Crescent.’

‘It is a risk she is prepared to take. I can show you the contract she signed that agreed to that very possibility.’

Vincent glares at him. Hojo stares back, daring him.

‘What is it, boy?’ he goads. ‘So gallant, so brave, but you have nothing. She is my wife, and she is a scientist with her own thoughts. Ask her, if you don’t believe me.’

Vincent opens his mouth, but all that leaves him is a sigh. He huffs out a breath, something almost a laugh, and turns on his heel to leave.

‘As I thought,’ Hojo sniffs.

Lucrecia looks at the door as it slams, flinches. She wants to follow him. A year ago, she would have, she’d have followed, and taken his face and she’d have kissed him until he trembled.

But that was then, and this is now.

 _Whore_.

* * *

He’s gone for long periods of time after that. She doesn’t keep track of them, loses track of the days. Her research becomes muddled, her notes illegible. She sleeps a lot, when she can get through the pain to sleep. Painkillers don’t work, either ineffectual or vomited immediately.

She spends time sat in Jenova’s chamber, staring at her, cheek pressed to the glass. Jenova stares back at her without moving her head.

Her belly is so swollen that she can’t fit into her trousers, has to buy new ones. The women in the clothes store look at her with disgust. She supposes that’s what she gets for being seen in one man’s company and then marrying another. But they wouldn’t understand. This is her career, her future. Her choice. She’s doing this for them.

Her dreams hurt, and she takes to sleeping with a stick between her teeth to stop her cracking them if she clamps her jaws too tightly. She doesn’t have seizures. They aren’t seizures.

Her eighth month comes and goes without fanfare, just more of the same whispers behind her ears and pains in her head, and then her water breaks.

* * *

Daniel, halfway around the world in Mideel, gets a phone call from Midgar, and when he answers it, he’s greeted by an audibly-terrified junior doctor.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ the man cries, and Daniel has to take a moment or two to try and calm him down.

‘Tell me what the problem is, and we’ll work through it,’ he says.

He doesn’t often get phone calls from ShinRa’s doctors, because he’d refused to work directly for them, only contracting with them for their citizens and their health care. But he gets the odd call from someone who either knows him personally, or knows his reputation, and he never refuses it.

‘She won’t stop bleeding!’ the doctor begs, and Daniel feels a chill down his spine.

Maybe it’s just the way fathers are, he supposes later, any time something bad happens to a female, you assume it’s your daughter, even though it can’t be. She’s in Nibelheim, for a start.

‘What sort of bleeding? Take a deep breath.’

‘It’s a haemorrhage,’ the doctor explains, breathing deeply, every word bracketed by a deep inhale. ‘She’s given birth, but she’s haemorrhaged, and we can’t stop the bleeding. She should have bled out, there’s too much blood.’

‘Now, Doctor, I know these things can look,’ Daniel starts, but the man on the other end of the phone cuts him off.

‘No, Doctor Crescent, she should have bled out. There is too much blood. More than half a gallon, easily, if not a whole one.’

Daniel takes a breath, frowns.

‘I – I can’t say – the only way she’d survive that is through exposure to mako. The lifestream here can help the body heal from injuries, but to heal on a scale like that, to replace lost blood quickly enough, it would be more than anything I’ve ever known.’

‘What do we do? They just – left her here. Took the baby. She’s going to die.’

There’s a moment’s pause. Daniel doesn’t know what to say. Sometimes mothers die in childbirth; it’s the worst part of the whole affair and sometimes there’s nothing they can do about it.

‘Her vitals are normal,’ the doctor says on the phone. ‘They’re totally normal. Heartbeat, oxygen, blood pressure. It should be dropping, she’s still bleeding. The machines must be malfunctioning. Oh shit – nurse! Doctor, she’s fitting.’

There’s so much panic in his voice that Daniel doesn’t know what help he’ll be. He listens as the doctor talks through what he’s doing, more to himself than to Daniel, and only interjects when he thinks there’s a better way. He sounds like a child, barely old enough to be in charge of filing paperwork, never mind saving a young mother’s life.

‘Why did they leave her?’ he hears the nurse ask. ‘Why isn’t she dying?’

Daniel sits there for nearly three hours, listening to the doctor – Johan, he learns, who hasn’t even qualified yet, is waiting on his thesis to be marked – work his way through trying his hardest to save this woman in his charge. It sounds like every complication Daniel would never wish on someone else has found its way to that table, and he doesn’t envy the poor boy. Dealing with one complication was hard enough. But to have the fits, the scans showing blood in the kidneys, the bleeding itself, the – he would hate to have to deliver that news to the poor thing’s parents.

‘The bleeding’s stopped,’ Johan says, finally. ‘She hasn’t fitted for an hour. Her vitals are still stable.’

‘You won’t know any more until she’s woken up,’ Daniel says, gently, ‘the fits can cause brain damage, but it’ll be hard for you to tell without her being conscious.’

‘She wasn’t in a good state when she arrived,’ Johan says, and Daniel hears the slap of gloves hitting a bin. ‘I couldn’t tell if she was distraught or in shock.’

‘It sounds like a traumatic enough experience for her,’ Daniel says, ‘she must have been terrified.’

‘They just cut into her with a scalpel,’ Johan says, the rush of a tap as he washes his hands nearly drowning him out. ‘It was borderline barbaric.’

‘I don’t think borderline is fair,’ the nurse snorts. ‘It was definitely barbaric. I’ve never seen anything like it. Like she was just. Surplus. The packaging they could throw away.’

Daniel doesn’t have much to say after that, and they seem to have it under control, so he bids them a goodnight, and asks that if there’s any further complications, they don’t hesitate to call him back.

* * *

She wakes to the soft, low murmur of Vincent’s voice, sounding far away and close at once, and she can’t make out the words, but the cadence is nice. Very like his father’s, slow and steady and collected. For several moments, she lies there, counts the veins on the back of her eyelids, which she can’t really see, but it’s bright behind them, like there’s daylight. She feels warm, comfortable, just for a moment.

‘Thank you, Veld,’ Vincent is saying, which is nice to hear him say. ‘I owe you.’

Silence; he’s listening, because she supposes he’s on the phone, and then a bark of laughter.

‘I suppose so,’ Vincent agrees, and then silence again, the click of a button. The call is over.

‘Vincent?’ she croaks, and the room freezes for a moment, his surprise a palpable sensation.

She feels his fingers on her wrist, the feather-light touch of calluses on her cheek, and she peels her eyes open enough to make out the vague shape of him, a dark shadow against the brightness of the room.

‘I was worried,’ he admits, that same low murmur velvet-soft against her soul. ‘When they said they’d released you – and the nurse was – you should have been in a ward, not coming back here.’

‘Ward?’ she echoes, a slur of half-formed syllables.

She shuts her eyes, aching and the pulse of her heart in her temples. He brushes her hair back, fiddles with her fringe, setting it straight, she imagines.

‘You gave birth,’ he tells her, and it feels like the world falls out from under her. ‘They say he’s perfectly healthy, but I couldn’t find him, they wouldn’t let me onto the maternity ward, and it was – it was hard enough to track you down. Hojo has him, according to Veld.’

‘He,’ she breathes. ‘A boy?’

‘Sephiroth,’ he tells her, and she tastes the feel of the name, mouths it.

A sharp pain across her eyes, buried deep into her bones, and he snaps out a ‘no!’ that echoes across her skull, but she couldn’t say why he’s so angry, so scared. He’s scared, and she doesn’t know why, but she can see Nibelheim burning, she can see her son burning Nibelheim to the ground, and Jenova is. She can hear laughter, and she’s never heard such an awful sound before.

When she comes back to herself, when the heat of the fire eases from her skin, and she can just feel Vincent’s fingers on the back of her neck, her arm, her hip, she’s crying.

‘You’re still having visions?’ he asks, the way he might ask if she had a cockroach problem in the cupboard under the sink.

‘He’s,’ she pants, and tries to find his hands. He gives them to her, lets her clutch them. ‘He’s – he’s so angry.’

‘Who? Hojo?’

She shakes her head, feels so tired.

‘I’m tired,’ she sighs, and he smooths a hand over her hair.

‘I’ll let you rest,’ he replies, and the air hangs heavy for a moment, stilted.

He’d have kissed her head, she thinks, if things were different. But she’s a married woman now.

* * *

She thinks he’s angry at her, but he never shows it. She deserves the anger, she thinks. She’s done such terrible things to him. The lies, and the – the secrets. She doesn’t remember what secrets she kept from him, but she kept them. She pushed and pushed and pushed, and still he stayed.

He deserves more than what she could have ever offered him.

* * *

It takes the better part of the week before she’s back on her feet, in some capacity. He has to help her up out of bed so she can go to the bathroom, and on the third day, she cries about her hair, so he helps her into the bath. She thinks about her lipstick, how she’s got no need for it, since she’s staying in bed and nibbling at the edge of a slice of bread more than anything. She misses it. She misses the barrier of it. She misses the way it looked, smeared across his mouth. Her _Bad Reputation_ marking him as much as it had marked her.

By the end of the week, she’s able to get down the stairs unaided, clutching at the bannister, with him two steps ahead of her, ready to catch her, so graceful as he walks backwards down the treads. She’s not eating much, but she’s moving, and that’s important.

Everything hurts. Her knees, her hips, her ankles, her wrists. Her head. Her heart.

‘Where’s my son?’ she asks.

Vincent doesn’t answer her, because he can’t, because he doesn’t know.

* * *

She finds her contract in the lab amongst a pile of papers. It doesn’t look like Hojo’s been here for weeks. There’s dust on the computer screen. She sits in the chair, gingerly, holding onto her belly as she does. Vincent is prowling in the mountains again, looking for something to pick a fight with. He’s restless, pent up, angry. She’s angry.

Her head hurts, her brain frazzled, her thoughts jumbled, burnt. Vincent says that because of the seizures, she might have brain damage, and she supposes she might do.

She shouldn’t have survived, she knows this. She’d bled too much, and she’d – she’d dreamt of it, when she’d slept, because all she had to do was sleep, and she’d dreamt of what happened, the way the doctor had been so panicked, so desperate to save her.

Was she worth that? She doesn’t know.

Sitting there, she reads over her contract, slowly, her eyes not focusing on the words for large periods of time. She picks out her name. It’s not spelled correctly. She laughs, because of course it isn’t. In the fucking contract that had her sell her baby to science, her name is wrong.

She wipes her nose, finds blood on the back of her hand.

Blood, she doesn’t remember why there’s blood. Did she have nosebleeds before?

She reads the contract again, finds that her name isn’t right.

‘They always spell it with a T,’ she says to herself, and laughs about it, because that’s so typical.

Why is she reading her contract?

Why did she sign it? What did she need to sign it for?

‘Where’s my son?’ she asks, but Vincent isn’t there to answer.

* * *

Vincent asks her what she wants to try to eat for dinner, and she stares at him.

‘Dinner?’ she asks, and he’s not looking at her, staring into the cupboards.

‘Mm, it’s getting late.’

She doesn’t answer, just keeps staring at him, and the silence drags for long enough that he turns back to her.

‘Lucrecia?’ he asks.

‘Dinner,’ she repeats, as if she’s trying to taste the word.

His eyes twitch, narrow, and then his head tilts, and something soft crosses his face.

‘Food,’ he says, ‘a meal. In the evening.’

‘Oh,’ she says, stares at her hands instead. ‘Okay.’

‘What would you like?’ he asks, and she shakes her head.

‘I don’t know,’ she says.

* * *

She comes downstairs to hear him in the kitchen, talking on the phone.

‘Yes,’ he’s saying, and she can see him pacing back and forth by his shadows stretching across the floor. ‘Yes, that’s exactly – yes, it’s getting worse. She’s still having the – I don’t – no, I don’t think – what do you recommend?’

He goes silent again then, for several long moments, and she turns, heads across the hall towards the stairs down to the lab.

‘Thank you, Professor,’ she hears, and she pauses.

What’s a Professor? Is she a Professor? She thinks she was a Professor.

No, no she wasn’t.

 _Whore_. _Abomination. Liar._

The voice startles her. She’s heard it before, but she can’t think where.

A flash of green, hateful and angry, and she grabs the rail with one hand, her eyes with the other.

‘Who are you?’ she asks.

Her vision clears, and she continues down the stairs.

Vincent comes to her in the lab, and she smiles brightly at him as he enters, pen in hand.

‘I found my notes!’ she explains, happily enough, at his queries as her to her activities.

‘Notes?’ he asks, and she shows them to him.

‘From when I was working,’ she says, ‘I suppose I took time off, for the baby. But I found my notes from before, and I thought I’d continue the research.’

Vincent takes them, and she watches his expression as he reads them. He’s frowning, and she can’t understand why. Surely getting back to work is a good thing? She’s been milling about with nothing to do, and she can get back to her research, and get back to working out what effect the Ancient’s cells have on affected human cells, get back to working out some practical applications. Her father would like to know, surely.

‘Lucrecia,’ he says, serious as anything, and she blinks up at him.

Her tongue feels very thick in her mouth, sticking to her palette as she says, ‘yes?’

It comes out a little garbled, so she tries again. And again. She nails it the third time.

‘Look at these for me,’ he says, and hands her some papers he’s holding.

She takes them, and frowns at them.

‘Is this a trick?’ she asks, her lip beginning to wobble. ‘Is this – did you – why did you do this?’

He shakes his head, hitches his trousers to squat next to her, sat at the desk, clutching the papers in her hands.

‘I didn’t,’ he says, ‘I think you just wrote them.’

‘I didn’t,’ she echoes, shakes her head. ‘No.’

She looks at them again. She doesn’t remember writing them, and she doesn’t remember writing them _backwards_. It’s her handwriting, absolutely, she knows her own handwriting, the perfectly neat and even ascenders and descenders and curly bits, everything so neat and pristine, the perfect girl’s handwriting, the exam officer had said to her. He’d said that, said he’d never seen a more perfect example of a girl’s handwriting. But it’s _backwards_ , each letter the wrong way round and it’s going the wrong way across the page and she _can’t read it_.

‘Why did you do this?’ she asks, and he shakes his head.

‘Lucrecia,’ he says, ‘we should get you to bed.’

She looks at him, her heart in her throat.

‘Bed?’ she asks, and something hot and heavy rushes through her blood, a flood of – of – ‘I don’t want to have sex,’ she tells him.

He laughs, surprised, and he reaches out, hesitates, doesn’t touch her. She wishes he’d touch her like he used to. Have to cover her mouth so her cries didn’t tell her parents they were fucking in the hot springs, or the neighbour in the hotel room, or the monster just beyond the treeline. She shivers, so cold for the heat in her blood.

‘No,’ he agrees, ‘not sex. Sleep. You’re tired.’

Is she tired? She supposes she’s tired. She rubs her eyes.

‘Yes,’ she nods.

He waits, but she doesn’t move, so he asks if she needs help.

‘No,’ she assures him, but he ends up scooping her up as if she weighs nothing.

They get halfway up the stairs to her bedroom when she grabs his lapel.

‘Vincent,’ she says, stares at him with horror on her face.

‘Yes?’

‘Vincent, my son. He’s – where’s my son? What’s he done with my son?’

His jaw sets, and something flashes across his eyes. In another life, she wonders if she might have loved him. She doesn’t remember loving him, but she supposes she must have.

‘I’ll ask about it,’ he promises, ‘and I’ll take you to see him.’

She nods, believes him.

* * *

Professor Gast calls her, and she answers, bubbling over with excitement.

‘Have you marked my thesis?’ she asks, ‘Professor Hojo said you were going to mark it, and I’d get my accreditation.’

Gast swears under his breath, which is something she’d never heard him do before.

‘Lucrecia,’ he says, ‘when was the last time you had a vision?’

She thinks about it. ‘This morning,’ she says, with certainty, a sharp nod that makes her earrings jangle. ‘I went – I went to the reactor.’

Gast hums, and she stares at the wall.

‘What did you see, in the reactor?’

‘I saw Jenova,’ she says, as though it’s obvious. Maybe it’s not obvious. ‘She’s an Ancient, and we’re using her cells to.’ She stops, because she doesn’t remember why they’re using the cells.

‘Lucrecia?’

‘I don’t remember why we’re using the cells,’ she admits, and braces the phone between her ear and shoulder to pick at her nails. ‘Something – something to do with – with – with.’

She can’t think of the word she wants. Words were _easy_. They were so easy, she knew _all of them_ , and she always knew which one she wanted, and she never had _any problems_ with using the _fucking things_!

‘Why can’t I remember it?’ she demands, and Gast is silent for a moment.

‘What is the last thing you remember?’ he asks.

‘You asking stupid fucking questions,’ she snaps, and then catches herself. ‘I’m – I’m sorry – I’m sorry, I’m – I feel – I’m sorry.’

‘It won’t feel like it,’ Gast tells her, ‘but you’re very lucky to be alive. From what the doctor that worked with you told me, and not what was put on the official report, you should have died.’

‘I want the report,’ she says.

‘Lucrecia,’ he says, ‘listen to me. You won’t get anything you can understand from the report.’

‘I’m not an idiot.’

‘No,’ he agrees, kindly. ‘But you went through something that was very traumatic to your body, and the Jenova cells in you don’t know what to do with the damage. Your visions, they give you seizures.’

‘No, they don’t.’

‘Listen to me. You had a seizure during the birth, and we know that that can cause brain damage. The amount of visions you’ve had, and the fact you’re still having them, which you just admitted you do, your brain is struggling to heal. The damage your body’s been through has been immense.’

‘You’re lying,’ she says.

Gast is quiet for a moment.

‘I haven’t seen my son,’ she says then, slow, sounding each word out.

‘No,’ Gast agrees, ‘I’ve heard not.’

‘Why not?’

Gast tells her, but she asks Vincent about it later, because she doesn’t remember what he said.

Vincent smiles across the table at her, sad, and she doesn’t know why he’s sad, but she feels like it’s her fault.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says, and has to say it again when it comes out with several sounds that don’t quite seem right.

‘It’s okay,’ he tells her, and reaches across the table to hold her hand.

* * *

The report is clearly faked, something Hojo had written himself, signed off on, making out like everything was okay, normal, fine. She sees it for what it is and tears it into pieces.

No mention of the haemorrhaging, the fact he’d torn her to pieces to get at her child, left a junior doctor to piece her back together and try to work out how to build her around fits and blood and infections. All of her scans and all of the tests they’d done, not one had shown anything wrong with her, but she’d been so ill, so sick. What had Jenova done to her that she could look fine on paper, and yet be disintegrating before her own eyes?

* * *

She dreams of her son, of holding him in her arms, her beautiful, beautiful son, with his – his – his – what colour is his hair? She doesn’t remember what his hair looks like. His hair is – is –

It’s black, like his father’s. He has her mouth, but he has his – his – his eyes are green, and she doesn’t know why his eyes are green, he should have his – his – her eyes. He should have her eyes, hazel, like her father’s, but darker, browner.

What colour is his hair?

* * *

‘Vincent,’ she says, as he sits at a table in the lab, cleaning the parts of his gun, somewhere behind her.

She’s fished out her notes on Jenova, and she’s making notes on her notes, comparing what she’s learnt to what she thought about the early visions. Gast said that the trauma she suffered during the birth has left her with brain damage, and she wonders whether that’s true. She feels perfectly fine, a little sore in places, and she gets the most awful headaches, but she had some awful headaches when she was pregnant, so she’s not sure it’s not just her blood pressure. The nosebleeds she keeps getting suggests it’s likely poor blood pressure, but she can’t quite bring herself to call her mother and ask about pregnancy and post-partum birth complications.

He’d sent over the report, and by all accounts, she’d been absolutely fine. Other than a kidney infection, and some minor bleeding during the birth, because Sephiroth – that was his name, Sephiroth, and she can taste the bile of it, the hatred, under her tongue – had been in a bad position, born a couple of weeks early, and he hadn’t been ready, not really. She hadn’t been, either.

The secondary report he sent, written by the doctor that had done his best to help her, though now she hears he’d quit, walked out of his final exam and not looked back, that report told a very different story. One of blood and confusion and fits. She can’t believe it, and she can’t believe that her husband would have left her there to bleed out.

Either way, she’s got a few complaints, but nothing major, and she can’t understand why Vincent keeps tip-toeing around her, like he’s surprised that she remembers who he is. You have a baby, and suddenly everyone around you thinks you’ve lost your mind!

Brain damage, ha.

‘Yes?’ he replies, not looking up from the grip he’s got pressed almost to his nose with how intensely he’s staring at it.

‘Did you ever manage to find out where my son is?’

He stops scrubbing a cloth over a scratch, and stares at nothing for a moment.

She looks at the garbled mess of notes she’s made, and screws the paper up, tosses it into the corner.

‘He’s in Midgar,’ he says, ‘from what I’ve managed to find out. Though Hojo intends to bring him back to Nibelheim soon.’

‘Hm,’ she says. ‘I signed a contract so that I would have access to him after the birth, whether Hojo thinks that I should have any credit for my part in this experiment or not.’

He nods. She stares at the paper she’s writing on and tuts at it. She’s got to start paying attention, her letters are so mangled it’s impossible to read. It’s almost like her father’s writing, but with more ink splotches. Vincent looks at it later and can’t pick a single letter out of the scribbles.

* * *

‘Do you think I could go home?’ she asks, and Vincent, sat behind her on a very uncomfortable stool, hums.

She needed a bath. It had rained the day before, and she’d tripped over outside, trying to unlock the gate. Vincent had asked her why she was trying to unlock the gate, and she’d not been able to give him an answer, because she hadn’t known why she was trying to unlock it. He’d asked where she wanted to go, and she’d looked towards the mountains, but she couldn’t tell him what it was she wanted to see up there. There was _something_ up there, something important, but she couldn’t remember what it was. Something – something mean. Grey, she thinks. Green, perhaps. Her heart beats every day but it’s not beating the beat she hears behind her ears.

‘Home?’ he asks, and scoops water in a cup to trickle over her scalp.

It’s warm down her back, and she shivers, curls her knees tighter. She’s not sure she likes that he sees her naked, and he offered to be naked too, if that would help, but she’d liked that idea even less, and it had taken him twenty minutes to get her to open the door. The last time she’d tried to have a bath by herself, he’d had to drag her out by her wrists and get as much of the water out of her lungs as possible. She couldn’t tell him later, wrapped in a towel and sobbing into her hands, whether she’d done it deliberately or not.

‘Home,’ she nods. ‘I – I have a baby sister.’

‘You do,’ he agrees.

‘You don’t think I should go.’

He stills, his knuckles warm against her back, her hair weightless in his grip. He’s combing it out, and she can feel the teeth snagging in the knots.

‘I think we should talk to your father.’

She considers this.

‘I have a baby sister,’ she tells him, brightly. ‘I haven’t met her yet, but she was named after a very famous creator. Something to do with – with – with – building things.’

‘Engineering,’ Vincent offers, and Lucrecia shakes her head, turns to look at him.

‘No. Building things.’

Vincent nods. ‘Building things,’ he agrees, gently turns her head back so he can finish with her hair. ‘You want to see her?’

‘I haven’t met her,’ Lucrecia repeats, and then, ‘I haven’t met my son either.’

‘No, I suppose you haven’t.’

‘I want to meet him.’

‘I know.’

She falls silent, stares at her knees.

He drapes her hair over her shoulder and runs water down her back, his hands hot, callused, familiar. She remembers them on her back, her shoulders, her waist, between her legs.

‘Do you think I could go home?’ she asks him, to distract herself.

‘I think so,’ Vincent agrees, quietly.

* * *

‘Professor,’ Vincent is saying when she makes her way downstairs, ‘she’s getting worse. She’s lost a lot of her language – yes, yes – some days she barely talks at all, and other days she tries but there’s nothing I can make out – no, no, when she does manage to write, it’s gibberish, and it’s illegible. I think she can still read – it’s hard to tell, she looks at – yes, exactly, it’s all stuff she knows by heart. That’s what – yes – I thought maybe there was something in – Mideel is a place – no, they don’t know.’

She stands there and she listens to it, but she doesn’t really know what he’s on about. It’s hard to make it out, only hearing half of the conversation.

‘Do you,’ Vincent starts, and then stops. ‘Do you think it will help?’

He listens, that patient silence he afforded her when she forgot her words, or lost the conversation, or sat staring up at the wall, seeing something she couldn’t name before finally coming back to him. Back to him, because it was always him. He was the one that was always there. She killed his father and still he stayed. She killed him, and it’s her fault, and she’s ruining his life, she’s already ruined it. _Bad Reputation_ and all, and she’s dragged him down with her.

He shouldn’t be here, he should go, he should get another job, another mission, someone else to look after.

‘She told me once that Mideel’s hot springs are infused with the lifestream, because it’s so close to the surface there. If it is Jenova cells causing this, if it’s trying to repair the damage, it can’t hurt. Surely?’

If either of them had stuck around long enough to find out about it, they’d have heard of the reunion theory Hojo started peddling, seen the damage that it could do. They’d have known better how to handle the cells in her body. They’d have known that a lot of the damage is Jenova’s cells trying to get back to the rest of them, to rejoin the mass. As it is, they don’t know this, and they don’t know what else to try.

But Mideel can’t make it worse, and if anything, her family deserve to know.

* * *

She has moments of clarity, wakes up feeling clear and level-headed, and she makes progress on things those days. Vincent watches her like a hawk, as if expecting her to crumble, but sometimes the clarity lasts for days. Sometimes it lasts until breakfast, and then she stumbles, forgets a word or loses her footing, or misses part of a conversation. He’s patient with her, talks her through it, holds her as she fits.

‘I don’t like living like this,’ she tells him, on those clear days, where the world looks right, and familiar, and she can find things without tearing the place apart for them. ‘This not knowing.’ She pauses, searches for a word to use, and just tosses her hands apart, apathetically encompassing everything around her. ‘Everything. Anything.’

He’s making breakfast, and he looks different in these moments, without his jacket or his holster, his shirt sleeves rolled to his elbows. He’s something else entirely. In a way, he reminds her of his father, and she doesn’t know why he’s still here, not when she told him she was responsible for his father’s death.

‘Why are you here?’ she asks, and he glances back; she wonders how many times she’s asked that over the last few months, when she’s barely able to remember who he is.

‘What are you asking?’ he asks, because he can see in her eyes that she’s asking a different question to what it normally means.

‘I told you, months ago, that I was responsible for your father’s death,’ she says, ‘and then I – I pushed you away, and I married Hojo, and agreed to let them experiment on our unborn child, and – why did you stay?’

He hums, looks at the pan before turning back to her.

‘My job is to keep you safe,’ he says.

‘Is that all?’ she asks, and something sad crosses his face before he turns away.

‘That’s all that matters, yes.’

She frowns at the table, picks at her nails. She hasn’t been to the salon since she found out she was pregnant, and her nails are worn-down stubs, cuticles little more than scabs.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says, and he hums.

They’re quiet for a while. She might have been able to ask something else, to ask why he said what he did all those months ago, to ask whether he meant it, whether he still does. But clarity comes and goes, and instead she asks him what he’s doing.

‘I’m making breakfast,’ he tells her, gentle.

‘I’m sorry. I forgot. I keep forgetting. Why do I keep forgetting?’

He doesn’t answer, because there isn’t an answer she’ll remember.

* * *

‘The thing is,’ Lucrecia says, as Vincent drives them across the planet to Mideel, her arm hanging out of the window and brushing the plants lining the road. ‘The contract only said that I couldn’t go home while I was pregnant. I haven’t been pregnant for days.’

‘Months,’ Vincent corrects, gentle.

She snorts. ‘Months. I haven’t been pregnant for months.’

Who cares how long it’s been? Her contract’s null and void, and she has nothing to thank Hojo for anymore. He can’t stop her going home, and there’s no reason for her to go back, either.

They drive in silence for a while, and Lucrecia stares out of the window.

‘Where are we going?’ she asks, when she doesn’t recognise the landscape.

‘I’m taking you home,’ Vincent tells her, patiently. He’s been very good to her, and she remembers he whispered something into her neck, something that she’d not wanted to hear, but that had made her – made her – her belly turns, bile churning, and something hot burning between her legs.

‘Home,’ she repeats, and looks at the backseat of the car. He glances at her, turns his head to look, but doesn’t see what she sees.

‘What is it?’ he asks, glances back again.

‘I – I had – why are you here?’ she asks, ‘why did they send someone from the Department of Administrative Research?’

He looks sad, for a moment. She goes to apologise, but the words won’t come out of her mouth.

‘To keep you safe from harm,’ he says, and offers her a very sad smile. ‘I didn’t do a very good job.’

‘I’m here,’ she says, with a warm smile, and she touches his arm, his skin hot beneath his layers. ‘I should have died, but you kept me alive.’

He shakes his head. ‘A doctor kept you alive, Lucrecia.’

‘No,’ she says, ‘no.’

He looks at her, but he doesn’t understand. He’s kept her alive, and for what? She hasn’t given him – a –

‘What do you get?’ she asks him.

‘What do you mean?’

‘From me. For this. I gave you something.’

He huffs a breath through his nose, as if pitying himself.

‘It doesn’t matter what I get,’ he says, ‘whether from you or not.’

‘Oh,’ she says, and she doesn’t think he gets it.

He glances at her, but she looks out of the window, and misses the sadness in his eyes.

‘Do you think she’ll like me?’ she asks, and when Vincent asks who, she says, ‘I wonder if my son will be there when we get back.’

Vincent tells her that he doesn’t know, but he’s sure she’ll like her.

‘Who’ll like me?’

* * *

Vincent is clearly concerned, clearly worried about whatever it is he’s got going on in his head, but Lucrecia’s glad to be home.

Her mother is glad to see her, and her father will be too, when he comes back from the clinic.

‘Lucrecia!’ her mother exclaims, and her face lights up. ‘We weren’t expecting you! And you brought Vincent with you, oh, I’m so glad! Come in, come in, Shera’s just having a nap.’

Shera, Lucrecia thinks, what a wonderful name.

‘You look well,’ Vincent says, because he’s a polite boy with manners, and he’s trying to diffuse a situation, but Lucrecia can’t imagine what.

‘You’re looking well, yourself,’ Hersilia says, ‘tired, but well. Has it been busy back in Nibelheim?’

Lucrecia looks at him, and he looks at her, and they both decide that they aren’t going to tell her. She sees the recognition in his face, and she wonders what he sees in hers that he has it. She feels – free. She supposes free is the word. There is no Hojo here, no – no – no –

No Jenova.

She can hear Vincent and her mother talking, but she goes to sit down at the table, her bones tired. She’s always tired these days. Holding her head up hurts. She wants to see her son.

‘Is Dr Crescent still at the clinic?’ Vincent asks, ‘I had a question to ask him.’

‘Oh, absolutely!’ Hersilia nods, ‘I’ll put the kettle on for when you get back. Coffee, isn’t it?’

‘One sugar,’ Lucrecia says, ‘stirred exactly eight times, counter-clockwise.’

Vincent pauses mid-step to look at her. She looks at him, and smiles. There’s something sad in the smile he gives her back, but she can’t imagine what it is.

Her mother talks about what’s been going on in the town, and Lucrecia half-listens. Her mother’s always talked a lot, but she’s finding it hard to listen, a buzz in the air that wasn’t there before.

‘What’s that noise?’ she asks and does her best to emulate it.

Her mother looks at her like she’s gone mad, and then looks around the kitchen.

‘We got a new fridge since you were last here,’ she hedges, and Lucrecia nods.

‘That must be it.’

Now that she knows, she can ignore it.

‘So, what have you been up to?’ Hersilia asks, and Lucrecia sits in silence for a very, very long minute.

She can’t tell her mother. She can’t.

So instead she shrugs, says that there’s not been a lot of developments in their project, and asks about her sister.

‘What’s she like? Does she cry as much as I did?’

If Hersilia sees it for the diversion tactic that it is, she doesn’t let on.

* * *

‘I’m tired,’ Vincent says, quietly, and she’d only come for a glass of water.

This keeps happening. How many phone calls has he hidden from her?

‘I know,’ he agrees to the silence on the other end of the call. ‘I understand that. I don’t know what else I can do.’

She turns away, heads back to her bedroom. There’s no point in listening in any further; she’s got all she needs to know.

* * *

Shera is beautiful, beautiful in a way Lucrecia almost envies. Her father had pursed his lips on getting back to the house, looked her up and down, the way she’d looked with her chapped lips and her flat hair, and the sharpness of her knuckles. He hadn’t said anything, but she’d known what he’d thought.

It isn’t Vincent’s fault, but she can’t tell him why she looks like this. Why she looks like she’s about to die, why she looks like she should already be dead.

At least with her head clear, she can eat, and keep it down.

So, there’s that.

But her sister, her sister is beautiful, bright eyes and already the same thick mop of hair that their mother has. She’s got their father’s expression, and Lucrecia asks if she needs glasses.

‘Probably,’ Daniel replies, cleaning his own. ‘I’m waiting for some new equipment to come in so I can check.’

‘She needs round ones,’ Lucrecia says, ‘like you have. They’ll suit her face.’

He laughs, assures her that he’ll look at them.

Shera seems to like her, plays with her fingers and the ends of her hair and babbles happily in her lap, giddy and giggly at the way she bounces her legs. It’s not a deliberate bounce, but it’s there, and Shera enjoys it. Vincent looks so sad, sat across the room from her, and Lucrecia wonders what he thinks.

Does he think she should have her son? Does he wonder how different things would be if it was his?

She can’t bear to think about it, so she doesn’t.

Think about what? She doesn’t know. Her sister sucks on her fingertips, and she bites back the ache in her cuticles.

She cries when Lucrecia puts her down, so she balances her on her hip, feels adrift for how much she wants her son there instead, and then feels sick for feeling that way. Her sister is beautiful, a tiny bubble of something _good_ , and she’d be a fool to reject it. So, she balances her on her hip and she goes to the phone and it takes her several goes to get Professor Gast’s number.

‘How did you get this number?’ he asks when he answers.

‘I’m brain-damaged,’ she says, ‘not an idiot. Vincent made the last call from the house, and I guessed it was to you.’

He laughs. Someone’s talking in the background, and she wonders where he’s gone. They haven’t really spoken since he handed his resignation in, and that’s – it’s been hard, to be honest. She doesn’t think he ever really forgave her for agreeing to the project in the first place. She didn’t deserve the forgiveness anyway. She’s done terrible things.

‘How can I help you, Lucrecia?’ he asks, and she takes a deep breath.

Shera plays with the cord, and Lucrecia watches her.

‘I’m scared,’ she admits, ‘I’ve got – I keep getting these moments, where I’m myself again. Like I haven’t been. Poisoned.’

‘Poisoned?’

‘I think she’s poisoned me. I should be dead, Professor. You read the reports, you heard the doctor. I shouldn’t be here, I shouldn’t be alive. If by some miracle I survived naturally, I should be in a vegetative state. I shouldn’t have any brain power at all. It feels like my brain is rotting in my skull, and every day it’s worse. Vincent says it’s getting worse.’

‘He said that?’

‘Not to me,’ she admits. ‘To you, I think. I heard him.’

Gast is quiet for a moment, and then he takes a deep breath.

‘I’ve done some more research,’ he says, ‘I – we were wrong, about the Ancients.’

‘Jenova?’

‘No, no, she’s still – something else. But about the Ancients not being with us. There’s one left.’

How long has he known? Did Hojo know? Why did they – if they knew, why was her – was that why she was cast aside? Is that why she’s been left in the Manor with nothing?

‘Lucrecia, breathe,’ Gast chides.

Shera babbles happily, and Lucrecia bends her head to press her nose to her sister’s hair, inhales the citrus smell of her soap, the familiar tang of the lifestream in the springs.

‘What does that mean?’ she asks, ‘if there’s an – if there’s one left.’

‘I haven’t got all the answers yet,’ Gast tells her, gentle, ‘but from what I’ve been able to make sense of, and from what we already know, Jenova’s cells are attached to yours. You said once that you’re from Mideel, that you used to go in the hot springs?’

‘With the lifestream, yes.’

‘It’s likely the Mako in your blood has attached to the Jenova cells, which is stopping the degradation of your cells, but not it’s not enough to completely repair the damage.’

She considers this for a moment.

‘Will I die?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe? From what Vincent’s observed, you go through periods of decline, and then normalise, so it seems cyclical. You’ll likely continue in this manner for – think of your research, into the effects Jenova cells had on compromised cells.’

‘They’re – repair or stagnate. They never decayed.’

Gast stays silent, and she takes a deep breath.

‘So it’s likely I’ll be like this for – for – ever.’

‘I couldn’t say,’ he says, ‘I’ve been trying to find an answer, but nothing the Cetra talked about comes close to what we did to you. I’m so sorry.’

‘Can we undo it?’ she asks.

‘Remove the cells? I doubt it.’

Shera fusses against her hip, and Lucrecia bounces her a little, hikes her enough to press a warm kiss to her forehead, leaves a lipstick mark behind. She wedges the phone against her shoulder and wipes it off with her thumb. The child is barely a year old, there’s no sense in tainting her with her sister’s poison.

 _Whore_. _Abomination._

‘Then I’ll just – do what I can,’ she says, softly.

‘Take each day as it comes.’

‘I’m sorry for wasting your time, Professor,’ she says, ‘for all of it.’

‘You didn’t waste it at all, Lucrecia. I’m sorry that your efforts haven’t been recognised.’

She hangs up, wonders what he means.

* * *

She wakes up and can’t work out why she’s in her bedroom. Vincent is already awake, the futon he’d slept on neatly folded away, and he’s fully-dressed, though there’s no need for him to be armed. Nobody would think to hurt her in this town. He’s stood by the window, his mouth down-turned, his arms folded.

‘Vincent?’ she asks, and he turns to look at her, and he sees something in her face, because he exhales slowly. It’s not a sigh, but he’s sad. ‘Why are – where’s?’

The words stick to the roof of her mouth, and he looks back out of the window before coming to sit beside her.

‘We’re in Mideel,’ he tells her, brushes the hair from her face. He looks tired. ‘We came to visit your parents, and your sister Shera. They don’t know about Sephiroth.’

She considers this, nods.

‘Where is he?’ she asks.

‘Hojo had him in Midgar. I don’t know if he’s back in Nibelheim yet, or whether he’s going to take him there.’

‘I haven’t seen him,’ she says, voice cracking.

He nods. His eyes are so sad. Red, like he’s been crying.

‘I know,’ he tells her. ‘Do you want to head back to Nibelheim?’

He wants her to stay, she can see it on his face. He’s tired of looking after her, and she doesn’t blame him. She’s tired of living it.

‘Do you think we should?’ she asks, has to repeat herself.

‘You’re struggling still,’ he says, and then he does sigh, looks at his feet. ‘I’d hoped the hot springs would help, but.’

‘It’s not. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s not your fault, Lucrecia,’ he tells her, ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t able to protect you.’

Her lip wobbles, and he draws her into his shoulder, lets her hide there until she feels safe enough to come out. Or she forgets what she was crying about and feels sick to think of being in his arms again, whichever comes first, he can never tell.

* * *

Vincent makes his apologies for their hasty getaway, and Lucrecia sits in the car. Shera is screaming and crying, and she wants to throw up. Her head hurts. Her heart. Something like a heartbeat bangs like a drum in her ears.

* * *

She’s in the lab when Hojo enters, bold as brass.

‘What are you doing in here?’ he demands, as though he hasn’t been away for _months_.

‘This is my lab,’ she snaps back, because it is.

Vincent said so, and Vincent had never told her a lie.

Hojo laughs, a laugh that sends a shiver down her spine. Vincent’s laugh, rare though it is, and barely more than a single chuckle most of the time, makes her entire soul warm.

She has a wedding ring, but she can’t remember who it’s for.

‘It’s my lab!’ she repeats, louder.

‘No,’ Hojo replies. ‘Only real scientists deserve laboratories, and you are still an intern.’

‘No,’ she says, ‘I’m a Doctor.’

‘Your thesis was never passed,’ Hojo tells her, as easy as telling her the time. ‘You aren’t a doctor. You’re a failure.’

She opens her mouth, closes it.

She can’t remember writing her thesis, can’t remember what it would have been on if she had written one. But she knows she can’t admit it to him, because that would mean admitting to her memory being bad. She doesn’t want to admit to anything, least of all what he did to her.

‘Where’s my son?’ she asks instead, takes her time getting the words into her mouth and swilling them around before she spits them out.

‘ _Your_ son?’ Hojo cackles. ‘ _Your_ son? Shall I tell you about _your_ son?’

* * *

‘He won’t let me see my son,’ she sobs, burying her face in her hands.

‘What?’ Vincent asks, and his voice is cold. For the first time, the last time, there is no warmth in the gravel of his baritone.

He takes her wrists, pulls them away from her face. He’d found her sobbing in one of the side rooms, sprawled on the floor like she’d fallen. She thinks she had, maybe. Her head hurts. A vision, possibly. She doesn’t remember. She just remembers that she’d been crying. Vincent had found her, got her upright, coaxed the words out of her mouth and the breath from her lungs, and her heart is pounding out of time behind her ears.

‘Lucy,’ he says, and she’d begged him, hadn’t she, to not call her that? She’d begged, but he can’t seem to stop himself. ‘Tell me.’

She shakes her head. ‘No,’ she sobs, tries to pull free, but his grip is secure. ‘No, he won’t let me see him, he won’t _let me_. I’ll only confuse him, he said. I’ll confuse him! His mother! I’m his _mother_! That’s my _son_ , and I can’t see him! He says – he says – he told me – Jenova – he said Jenova.’

‘Jenova what?’ Vincent asks, still cold, still so calm, and she should know, she should see it, she’s begged him back from this before, but she can’t see it, she doesn’t know how to beg him to stop.

‘She’s his mother now, he’s her son. He’s not my son. That’s my baby, and I never got to hold him.’

He brushes his fingertips under her eyes, holds her face. For a second, she thinks he’s going to kiss her. For a second, she wants him to. She wants him to hold her down and – and – and –

There is something dark in his eyes, something bloody and familiar, and she feels it burn in her bones.

Then he’s turning on his heel, and he’s storming from the room, to the lab, and to the end of his own gun.

* * *

The gunshot startles her awake. She doesn’t remember going to sleep. Her teeth hurt, her gums bleeding. Why was there a gunshot? She doesn’t remember. What had she heard?

‘Vincent?’ she asks, but he’s not there.

* * *

She doesn’t see Vincent for days. Sephiroth isn’t there. Hojo is, but Sephiroth isn’t. She doesn’t know why her son isn’t there, and it – it –

She goes to the lab, because that’s where Hojo always is. She’ll ask him. He’ll know. He knows most things, and he can always find out the things he doesn’t know. He’d always had the answers for her.

The lab door is locked, and she tries the handle, but there’s no – no – she can’t get through the door.

‘Hojo?’ she calls, but her tongue feels sticky again, and she doesn’t think that what comes out of her mouth is his name.

A clatter from upstairs; Vincent’s back.

* * *

Hojo leaves the lab unlocked, finally, which is all she’s wanted for days. All of her notes are inside the lab, and she wants to do something. Sitting around has never been her style, but she can’t remember what she used to do. Vincent would tell her, but Vincent’s not here.

She wonders where he’s gotten to.

Vincent hasn’t been around to take her to the reactor, and she’s too tired to walk, but not tired enough to sleep. She used to run up the mountain, she thinks. She found running shoes in her closet, so she must have run at some point. She feels an ache between her legs at the thought of running, and figures she needs the toilet. She needs the toilet a lot these days, it must be something to do with the pregnancy.

When she gets into the lab, she’s – she’s –

There is so much wrong, and she doesn’t have the words for it. She wishes she had the words for it. She wishes she had never agreed to the experiment. She wishes she hadn’t had the baby. She wishes she hadn’t had the seizures and the fits and the bleeding that have turned her head to mush, and she wishes she understood what was happening to her.

‘Vincent?’ she asks, but there’s no reply. He just lies there on the table, scarred in places he should never have to be scarred, and she runs her hands down his skin, across the long expanse of it, shoulder and pectoral and abdomen, the curve of his hip, stitched together and plastered in potion.

He’s cold to the touch. Is that dead or alive, she can’t remember.

The wounds look fresh, still raw at the edges. She rubs her nose, and it comes away bloody.

Her head hurts.

‘What happened to you?’ she asks him, but he looks grey, and if he’s breathing, she can’t see it.

She can hear a gunshot ringing inside her skull, but she doesn’t remember why. Vincent fired the gun a few times, just a few. He never really had to use it around her. He kept her safe and out of danger. He kept her safe.

Didn’t he?

She feels muddled, confused, can taste blood on her lips.

There must be something around here. Hojo kept notes on everything, and she tears the lab apart to find it. He worked on the computer as much as he worked by hand, and when she finds nothing written on paper, she looks at the computers, can’t remember the login. He’s not used hers, because that would be too easy. Hojo has never made anything easy for her in his life.

‘Vincent,’ she sighs, looks back at him.

He’ll die without her. He might already be dead. She has to do something. Something.

‘What do I do?’ she asks, and then it rushes over her, that familiar calm.

_Just walk! It’s not going anywhere!_

‘Dr Valentine.’ And then, ‘Chaos.’

* * *

She kicks off her shoes and tears the armpit of her lab coat ripping it off, but she manages to get Vincent sort of upright, dragging him off the table and apologising all the way as she drags him across the floor and piles him into one of the tanks and filling it up. It’s automatic, the way she does it; Hojo had explained the process to her, even though she’d never done it herself. It was a way of staving off decay, of preserving tissue. It would buy her time.

‘I’m sorry,’ she tells him, when she cracks his elbow off the edge of the tank, ‘I’m so sorry.’

Once she’s managed to decipher the nonsense that is the home screen of the computer, and she’s taken entirely too long to give the command prompts to get it running, she sits and watches him. He doesn’t look alive. She wonders if she looks alive.

* * *

It takes her too long to remember how to program the computer properly.

‘Please,’ she begs, even though she doesn’t know what she’s begging, or who, or why, ‘please, just – just give me five minutes.’

The screen flashes red and red and red and red and red and she stares at it, sobs.

She’s never failed at something she’s put her mind to, but her mind doesn’t know how to be put to anything anymore. It just – is.

But if she doesn’t do something, he will die. The Mako she’s put into the tank is poison, she knows this. It’s tainted. She’s not even sure it’s – it’s viable. It’s old now, saved from the cave she’d found with Dr Valentine all those – years, it must have been years now – ago. They’d brought some of the Mako back to study, and they’d tried to make sense of it, but it was volatile. Tainted. She doesn’t know if it’ll work.

But she has to try.

The computer finally accepts her commands and starts pumping the Mako into the tank. She looks at Vincent, but he doesn’t react.

* * *

‘I thought I smelled a rat.’

She whirls around, holding her head. She’d smashed it off the counter when she went down, another vision of Jenova. She was being torn apart, and the angriest little part of her had thought _good_. The rest of her struggled to remember where the potions were so she could get the gash on her forehead fixed.

‘Get out of my lab!’ It comes out of her shrill, a shriek.

Hojo cackles, head thrown back and hunch worse than ever.

‘I had wondered,’ he cackles, approaching the tank, where Vincent still looks – looks –

‘Feel free to wonder,’ she snarls, clutches at the counter to keep her knees locked. ‘Get out of my lab.’

‘He is a failed experiment,’ Hojo tells her, ‘too weak to stand the things I did to him. A shame, really. A fine specimen otherwise, don’t you agree? Still, I’m sure he’s glad to be helping his beloved with her experiments _one last time_.’

What is he saying? It doesn’t make sense. Other than reaching for a folder on the top shelf for her once or twice, Vincent hasn’t done anything to help her with her work. He’s not even been able to get into the lab for the most part. He’s been stuck outside, because the lab is locked, unless she’d let him in. And she hadn’t done that.

Had she?

‘Get out of my lab!’ she tells him, again, and tries to keep her voice calm. The words come out garbled, confused.

Hojo raises his eyebrows. She straightens her shoulders, juts her chin. She won’t show weakness.

‘Well, well, well,’ he chortles, ‘aren’t we in a sorry state? I thought maybe you had something to you when you survived the birth. But you’re just flotsam to the river of life, aren’t you?’ He turns back to Vincent, in the tank and looking no different. ‘I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that you’d turn to this. Once a scientist, always a scientist, eh, _Lucy_?’

She feels sick, lurches towards the bin in the corner. His cackling almost drowns out the sound of her guts.

‘So desperate to finish that thesis, aren’t we! So desperate to be right. To not be what everyone thinks you are.’

‘I’m not,’ she chokes, ‘I’m not.’

She wipes her mouth, tastes blood in her gums, straightens. She’s half a mind to throw the bin at him, but she leaves it on the floor. She can’t pass Vincent the ketchup without dropping it. He’d been so patient with her.

‘Not what? A scientist? We always knew that. You were merely a convenient piece of packaging.’

Lucrecia bites the back of her lip, stares at her hands. She’s wearing a wedding ring. She can’t remember why.

She married someone. Who did she marry?

She’s a scientist, she knows this. She has clarity about it. About the things she has to do, record, make notes of. She understands that. She can do that in her sleep. But she’s so unclear around the rest.

‘Where is my son?’ she demands, but the words sound muffled, and she wonders if she said them at all.

Cackling, Hojo makes his way out of the lab, slamming the door behind her.

* * *

The pain is something else. She’s used to it now, used to the bleeding and the aching and the burning, but she’s tired. She’s so tired.

Vincent hasn’t stirred. She doesn’t know what else to do.

If Chaos has rejected him –

* * *

She wakes to a bang, and she falls out of the chair. Scrambling to her feet, she stares at the tank, and the thing in there stares back.

‘Vincent?’

It’s not Vincent, but they’re his eyes. They’re _his_ eyes. They’re her son’s eyes. The wrong colour, but they’re his eyes.

Despite being submerged, the _thing_ screams, and she can hear it, the way she hears the laughter, nearly constantly now, the harsh, grating laughter of a heart that beats a pulse not her own.

‘Tell me what to do,’ she begs it, ‘tell me how to make it better.’

The creature continues to scream, and she knows it for what it is. She can’t remember its name, but she knows it. There’s something she’s missing, but she can’t think, she can’t think, she can’t _remember_.

 _Stop for a moment_ , Dr Valentine had told her once, when she’d gotten herself into a state over some missing piece of her thesis, still in shreds in the box with the rest of the documents from the Omega Reports. _Stop panicking and stop thinking about it. Think about something else_.

Easy for him to say, she snorts, he didn’t have brain damage. He didn’t have a brain to be damaged anymore, on account of him being dead. And she’d killed him. She remembered that.

She could never forget that.

What was she missing? There was one thing left that she’d been missing. Something she’d overlooked.

The creature continues to scream, to thrash against the tank. It begins to crack, split.

‘Give me a minute!’ she shouts at it, clutching at her temples.

It’s as startled as she is. It stops shrieking, thrashing. Vincent’s eyes stare at her, baleful. Pleading.

The word sticks in her mouth, but she knows what it is, what she needs.

It’s in the box, with the rest of the documents. Buried at the bottom. The – the – they found it, in the cave. With the Mako. She’d thought it would be useful, something important, related to the tablets they’d found, but Dr Valentine hadn’t been sure. What he’d read had been concerning enough, but she was _sure_.

She has to try.

The creature stares at her. She stares back.

‘Give him back,’ she tells it, and it closes Vincent’s eyes.

* * *

Her hands are covered in blood, and she’s smeared it on her face, but she’s done it. There’s nothing else she can do. All that’s left is for Vincent to decide to live. It’s a cruel fate, but she couldn’t let him die. She’d killed his father, she couldn’t kill him, too.

She hopes he chooses to live. For both of them.

* * *

She wakes up in the reactor, after a really pleasant dream. She thinks it was a dream. She doesn’t remember it, and Vincent isn’t there to ask. She’d been on a picnic with him, and he’d dozed off. He’d never slept around her, she doesn’t think.

She doesn’t know.

She’s not sure.

Her head hurts. What had she done? She doesn’t remember. Gast had said it would be cyclical. That it would come and go. She was – she supposes this makes her the failure Hojo thought she was. She’d failed them all. Dr Valentine. Vincent. Her son. She’s never held him. She’s never even seen him.

She’s never seen her son and she calls herself his mother.

He must hate her. She deserves that hatred.

She can’t stay. She’s not fit to stay.

She has to go.

* * *

She stands in front of the tank, stares at the – the – it isn’t an Ancient. She doesn’t know what it is. She can’t remember its name. Her head hurts. Her heart beats in her ears.

‘You aren’t going to let me go,’ she says, and she thinks she sees it smile.

* * *

Before she leaves, she gathers the last of her notes, all the details of what she did to him, all the ways she’d tried to save him, the theories she’d gathered from his father’s notes, and she shoves it all in the box with the rest of the research. She chokes around her blood as she writes a note to explain herself to him, to tell him what happened, why, to apologise. She puts that in the box too, and she puts it where he’ll find it.

If Jenova wouldn’t let her die, the only thing to do was sleep, to close her eyes and let it burn in her soul. One of them would outlast the other. By the things she’d seen – the – the – the visions she’d had –

She thinks she knows the answer.

* * *

Vincent wakes, cold, alone, his skin aching. His soul tired.

Next to him is a box, water-logged, stained with the damp of the cellar. It’s bent and creased, and he recognises the handwriting on the top.

_Chaos and Omega: Reports, Findings, Evidence._

He can see where she pressed too hard with the pen, where her grip faltered. He can see the difference in colour between the dampness in the bottom corner to the stains on the top; wine, he thinks, the red they’d drank, even though she was too young to buy it.

Why would she leave this? It was her everything, the one thing she could take pride in. She wouldn’t leave it behind, unless she had no intentions of continuing the research.

The realisation hits him like a brick.

She’s dead.

He couldn’t stop her. He failed the one order that had ever mattered to him; keep her safe. So many ways he’d tried, and so many ways he’d failed, and in the end, she’d been taken from him by something he couldn’t battle for her.

He opens the box, the smell of her perfume trapped between the pages. At the top, a note, hastily scribbled, over and over and over again. She’d been in a bad way, he knows, her brain rotting in her skull, disintegrating by the second, and the Jenova cells had been doing their best to repair it. Gast had explained it to him, and he’d done what he could to help her, but her demons were her own.

 _I’m sorry_ , _I’m sorry, I’m sorry._

He reads the note over and over and over again. There’s nothing else to it, no other attempts at words. The two she’d written had been hard enough by the spelling. One of them is upside down, a real indicator of how bad she’d been. He’ll never find her body, because there’s no telling where she’s gone.

Wedged into a corner of the box is a bracelet, silver links and it’s beautiful, something he imagines her wearing day after day, and it smells, even now, of her perfume. He wonders why she stopped wearing it. He wonders whether he should send it to her parents, to her sister. Would she like that? Would they _want_ a reminder of their daughter? Do they know she’s gone? How long has it been?

It’s too small to fit around his wrist, but it sits across his hand as he reads the papers, links pinching the meat of his thumb, and he tries to make sense of why she left them.

His head hurts. His body. His soul.

He’d failed her, and the pages blur.

**Author's Note:**

> Lucrecia as played by Anne Hathaway, specifically in the Princess Diaries.
> 
> Vincent as played by Alex Landi.
> 
> Hojo as played by rest in fucking piss.
> 
> Fun fact: there are exactly 99 line breaks, which makes this 100 sections long.


End file.
